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He was a black teddy bear, sitting and waiting like a bridge troll for the boy, now college age.  His eyes were marble and red, and he sat alone in a dark room, covered in wood panels, for seven years.  On the bed sheets covered with the blue colonial images of naked, dancing women, the black teddy did sit on his pillow and play the saxophone.  He played soft and sad as the houses outside the window glowed orange with fire from the throwers of Fascist soldiers, and the screams of Jewish and Communist children.  

 

The black teddy bear, with tears in his eyes played the same sax solo from a Men at Work song over, and over, and over again.  A message from the distant future.  There was nothing to fear, as the earth is small and we are ants.  

 

The black teddy bear jumped from the bed, finding a cigar box below the racist caricature of a black faced man from America.  The bear loved this figurine, but not as much as the contents of the cigar box.  He knocked the figurine over and it shattered into a million ceramic pieces, filled with nothing.  The black teddy bear lifted a pair of grey underwear from the box, held it up to his nose, and sniffed, like a dirty old man.  They still smelled like him, the boy.  They made him think of those nights, way back in history, when he was twelve.

The bear and he slept together at night, his bare boy chest against his cloth bear back.  A primal urge in the boy would grow, and he would take the bear in his purple hands, and face him towards the wall, as not to look at the boy when he had begun to maturbate with shame and haste.  The bear would then hear jerking, grunting, squealing of the mattress.  Then he would smell the boy’s fluids and want to see what he had done, to feel close with him.  

The bear reminisced and pondered, snuggling the boy’s old underwear like an old friend, thinking they still smelled like those nights.   

 

Under that was a photograph, old and brown.  The bear lifted it to his big face and felt a shudder of yearning for the past in every cell that image was created with.  There was the boy, just like for real, at the age of fifteen, when passion was lagging between the bear and he.  He was still beautiful, thought the black teddy bear.  A tall, handsome, long nosed young man in a suit that made him look thin like a big daddy spider.  A copy of Finnegans Wake, when it was first published in English, was held sturdy under his arm, like he knew what it was even about.  He stood with glassy eyes, not smiling, and the bear could hear his heart breaking.  

 

As a one year old, the bear knew the boy was destined for greatness, how ever small it may be.  As an eighteen year old, the bear began to lose hope.  One night  the boy had come into his room in a huff, plopping down onto the bed, emaciated and sick.  An even sicker, even thinner man plopped on top of him, kissing him, wiggling his tongue in his mouth.  The bear was then knocked onto the floor, splinters wedging into his fragile skin, as he watched his boy and the man make desperate love under his roof, in his home.  

Was this not my destiny? The bear watched the boy with the brown eyes he had known and slept with all his life have his neck bitten by this ill man with long brown teeth.  He watched as the man took down his trousers, under the cover of night and the sound of shells exploding outside.  The strange man took the boy’s genitals into his mouth, and the boy made those sounds.  Those bedtime sounds that the bear was turned away from all these years, and not allowed to see.  Black pubic hair, and cigarette burns covered his grey skin like a beaten, pinkish pile of gutter meat.  

My boy, how could you betray me like this?  The bear watched, abandoned on the floor with tears in his eyes, afraid and confused.  The image of the boy climaxing into the maw of them man reflected like lake water in the tears of the teddy bear, and the boy sat up, huffing as the strange man coughed the boy’s seed into a pocket handkerchief.  The boy, with his pants down, then pulled the stranger into his chest with his bone thin arms, weeping like crazy, and the stranger began to weep as well, groping him like a cat.  

 

“I love you.”  The boy cried to him, his voice bouncing up and down with grief and the fear of a child about to be born.  The stranger only nodded, holding the boy tighter, saying nothing.  The boy only began to weep harder, and the bear watched, the sound echoing through out his mind for the next seven years.  As that was the last night the bear had seen him, and since then, his room was dark, and there were no sounds other than war noises.  

 

The bear then wrapped the underwear around his waist, like a toga of remembrance.  He took his saxophone in his paw, and circled around the room, playing that one solo from Men at Work.  He felt blue all around him, smelling the boy, wherever he may be.  He called for him with his little bear saxophone, to the mountains on high to the rivers filled with corpses down low, waiting for him to sing back and say “I’m here!  I’m here!”.  

The little black teddy bear walked around, playing, pretending to hear him, but there was nothing to be heard.   

 

“What the hell’s this?”  Said a German officer when the wall was blasted down with a thunder of explosives, that would shake any sternum.  They stood in the black rubble, orange fire and blue smoke as they watched the bear circle and circle, playing his little saxophone that the human ear could not hear.  

 

“Huh, Jewish toy.”  The other soldier with a helmet over his eyes grabbed the little bear by the leg, still moving as if a motor or a demon had possessed it’s being.  He held the bear upside down, shook it, but the saxophone did not come off.  “I think it is.  Should we throw it on the pile, or do you want it?”

 

The German officer had turned for only a moment to watch the neighboring houses burn down, flicking a booger from his nose.  “No, I don’t want it.”

“Why not?  It’s kind of sweet, isn’t it?”      

 

The officer touched the soldier on the back as they walked across a field of dirty, dead horses, and dead men, women, and children.  Their bones were grey and red, sticking from the ground, screaming for an eternity.  Before the two men and the bear was a massive inferno.  A huge pile of the toys of Jewish children was being burned at the hands of little devils and demons.  Other soldiers shoveled them into the fire with wheelbarrows, and sweat on their foreheads.  

 

“It’s not very sweet at all.”  Quoth the officer.  The soldier kissed the bear, kissed the face of the officer, and then kissed his own hands as he released the black teddy bear into the black night.  The black teddy bear’s spirit was already long disconnected, floating forever in space, and turning like a tomato in the sea before he fell into it, and burned to death.