“Bear! Sir Bear!”

Sammy’s voice echoed in the night air, frosting in puffs with each cry. Surrounded, he pressed his back against the metal of a street lamp, the stinging cold biting through the thin material of his red, stripy pajamas. His feet almost tripped over a black bin bag that had been piled with others against the street lamp. There was nowhere for him to run–they had cut off his escape back up the alley towards home and the exit out onto the main road. At this time of night, everyone was asleep. No-one would hear his calls for help.

He only had one hope.

The orange light of the street lamp painted the shadows of his three assailants longer than their diminutive statures should allow. They watched Sammy hungrily, each atop a beaten, scar-ridden cat. He had never liked cats. Too mean. Dogs were his favorite, although his parents had never let him have one. They weren’t going to change their mind any time soon either.

To his left was a one-armed Action Man, to his right a Monsieur Stretchstrong with limbs twice the length of its body, and between them was a one-eyed Barbie whose hair had seen better days. Judging by her dress-up clothes, Sammy guessed she had been a Doctor Barbie. He remembered seeing the advert on TV last Christmas.

They tightened the circle around him, their little plastic faces lit up with the joy of cornered prey. Sammy knew what they wanted. He also knew they’d never be satisfied with any amount he offered them. They’d want it all and, even if he didn’t know how, he knew they would take every last speck.

Sammy shivered.

“Lay it on us, boy, and we’ll make sure you get home safe to your parents,” said the Action Man. His tone was calm, but Sammy noticed he didn’t sound like he did on the advert. He was supposed to be American, but he sounded more like the bald road worker who whistles at Mum when she walks him to school. Mum always walks faster on that road, her hand a bit tighter around Sammy’s.

“N-no,” stuttered Sammy. He looked over the heads of his attackers for a sign of hope. He would come. “Sir Bear told me never to trust wild toys.”

Barbie’s cat stepped forward, hissing. “We just want to play.” She sounded like Sammy’s aunt from Birmingham, a woman never without a cigarette in her mouth.

“I’m not playing with this kid,” said Monsieur Stretchstrong. He definitely didn’t sound French. Sammy didn’t know what he sounded like. Why did toys never sound like they were supposed to?

“That’s not what Barbs means, Stretch,” said Action Man. He looked Sammy up and down. “You shouldn’t play with your food.”

A voice rumbled from the darkness beyond the synthetic glow of the street lamp. “Away, plastic leeches. Thou shall not have my squire.”

Sammy’s heart lifted. He knew he would come. He always did.

“You guys are in trouble now,” said Sammy. A wide smile stretched across his face, dissipating the fear the three wild toys and their steeds had cast over him.

The wild toys twisted around to face the voice, their little plastic hands yanking at the cats’ furry necks to turn. The cats yowled in anger and pain. Sammy felt a bit bad for them, even if they looked ready to scratch his face off.

The Action Man scanned the darkness beyond their halo of light, one of his small hands scratching behind his cat’s ear. It purred approvingly, forgetting the rough handling. “What’s this? An appetizer for our main course?”

Sir Bear, or just Bear as Sammy called him, waddled into the light. His usual frown was deeper than ever, a look the people of the toy company would have hated to see on their cute and cuddly teddy bear. Being Sammy’s Guardian seemed to bring it out in the knee-high teddy. Bear straightened his little red shirt–it constantly rode up on his paunchy body–and pulled his pen-sized sword from the scabbard slung across his back.

Sammy had never found out where the sword came from; he had never even been allowed to hold it. It certainly hadn’t come with Bear–especially as it was a very real and very sharp blade. Despite asking about it many times, Bear always answered the questions in the same way: A Knight is nothing without his sword.

Bear levelled the sword at each of them in turn, as if marking them. The street lamp lit the blade with a fiery glow. “Die dishonorably by my hand, or fade honorably. The choice is thine,” he grumbled.

“You owned toys are all pompous little freaks,” said Barbie.

Bear nodded, accepting that as answer enough. He looked at Sammy. “Close thy eyes, squire. Don’t open them until I say.”

“But–”

“Squire…” Bear warned.

Reluctantly, Sammy covered his eyes with his fingers. How was he supposed to become a knight if he didn’t watch Bear fight? But Bear insisted combat was not for young eyes. In fact, his code as a knight forbade it. Violence should not darken one’s childhood, as Bear had once said, rather definitively, after an afternoon of Sammy’s begging to sword fight.

Sammy opened his fingers a crack, enough to see the small battle play out. Of course, it was only in case Bear needed his help.

Bear leapt at Monsieur Stretchstrong with all the agility of a gymnast. You would never think it looking at him: his pudgy, round body and plump arms and legs were built for cuddling, not fighting. Bear grumbled about his size often, but Sammy knew he preferred it that way. Everyone underestimated the snuggly teddy bear.

Monsieur Stretchstrong was thrown from his cat, his limbs trailing after him like the tendrils of a jellyfish. Bear smacked the rear of Monsieur Stretchstrong’s cat, which hissed and scampered away. A rubbery arm flew at Bear, trying to wrap itself around him. With a single swing, Bear hacked the arm in two, the fist falling to the floor.

Sammy gasped.

Bear’s frown became a scowl. “Peek not, squire. I know thou art watching.”

Sammy closed the crack between his fingers. “I’m not!”

Bear didn’t reply. All Sammy heard for the next few minutes was hissing cats, metal shearing plastic, and the frenzied shouts of the wild toys. The sounds of battle only tempted him to peek again, but Sammy stopped himself. Bear was angry enough with him already. All he could do was listen.

A husky cry of pain made Sammy look. Worry swelled. He had never heard that noise from Bear before.

The broken, inanimate bodies of the wild toys littered Bear’s battlefield. Sammy saw the faint gold of their life magic escaping into the night air–barely sparks against the dark sky. No wonder they had fought Bear so desperately–they had been on the cusp of fading. With or without Sammy and Bear, tonight would always have been their last.

Kate Calhoun broke the news when she came by to clean the other day. At first, she teased me with what my father always called “woman talk, who was dating who, who was sneaking off with who, that kind of thing. I sat in my easy chair in the living room and read the paper, nodding and grunting responses, the way I had when Muriel used to run her gob. But suddenly, she sucker punched me with something that hit deep.

“They’re closin’ up Chad Riley’s bar,” she announced.

Down came the paper, and I peered over my shoulder at her while she dusted off the living room lampshades. “What now?”

“Heard it from Dan Riley hisself!” she declared, as if I had dared contradict her. “They’re closin’ her up. Gonna sell it to some outfit from outta town.”

There was more, but I didn’t bother listening. My mind drifted immediately elsewhere, back to better days when I was a younger man. I sat there long after Kate had left and let the memories come flooding in like the tide. I could taste the cold draft beer, hear them pool balls clacking like cassinettes, and smell the mix of smoke, whiskey, and Chad Riley’s English Leather cologne that had always hung in the air around the bar.

And suddenly, I was there on the stool, which was my stool, at the corner of the bar which was my corner, and Dusty was there at my elbow like a ghost. I could even hear the boys, all the boys, from Johnny King to Nick Little, from Willy Cashum to Pete Bigelow, they were all there, laughing and drinking draft and talking about girls, trucks, anything and everything. Chad Riley’s, a lynchpin of my existence that had stood for five decades, and which I had taken for granted would stand for ten more.

I’ve lived in south Texas my whole life, in the same town where I and Muriel raised a family. I grew up on daddy’s farm, which I inherited when he retired. We had Bobby here, and I kept the place up after he moved and Muriel died. And all that time, nearly twenty-five years, there was a Chad Riley’s to serve as my second home. I was thirty when Chad opened it (he come down from Vegas, where he used to be a bar tender at one of them Caesar’s Palace-type outfits) and it had become as much a part of me as my fingers and toes.

Though I was sitting down, I could feel myself floating out of the chair and into the air, like one of them Astroturf projections that I heard about on TV. I was walking through the front door of Chad’s, into the dark wood interior with the tables all in one corner, the bar on the right by the jukebox, and two pool tables taking up the rest of the place with a little hallway that went to the bathrooms. Over the bar hung a wall-to-wall neon silhouette of a sexy lady showing some leg, which Muriel had once petitioned to have taken down to no avail. When you came into Chad’s, you felt like you were coming home, like the whole place always had its arms open, ready to embrace you.

Hearing about the bar being closed, I felt the way you would if somebody you loved had finally died of cancer. Watching them slog through life in pain was more burden than the thought of them dying, and you felt free when they finally kicked the big one. I had felt that way when Muriel passed, and I felt that way when I heard Chad Riley’s kids had finally decided it was time to end their father’s legacy.

The cancer that killed Chad’s, of course, was The Chopping Night. Nothing was ever the same after that, and those memories tainted the bar forever. Chad Riley retired a year after all that hullabaloo and his kids tried to keep the doors open, but the boys all gradually left off coming. Me and Dusty started hanging out at Rudy’s pub instead, and though we talked about going in to say hi to Dan Riley from time to time, we never did. We couldn’t.

Part of it was the men in suits, who showed up and started making life difficult. This is south Texas: nobody wears a suit, not even on Sundays. But after the Chopping Night, almost every day, two or three preppy fellas in two-piece business suits would troop in and hang around asking questions about Carl Bannon. They was like Joe Friday from that cop show, and made a habit of pestering everybody in the bar. Funny thing, even though Chad normally took absolutely no shit from anybody, he wouldn’t even look those button-up Bills in the eye. Willy and Pete petitioned him to have those suit guys barred several times, but Chad wouldn’t even give them a straight answer. It was clear as day he was scared of’em, and Chad Riley wasn’t scared of nobody except Marv McMurphy, who got the needle after he carried out one of the most brutal crimes in Texas history.

Oh, there’s books about the Chopping Night and true crime podcasts and even an episode of one of them crime report shows that Muriel used to watch. Over the years, I’ve talked to journalists and writers and even a couple of young people who blew into town to make a YouTube video about it. I told them the same balooey I’ve told everybody, the basic rundown that leaves out everything that actually happened. What me and Dusty and Chad Riley saw ain’t something you can tell folks. It ain’t’ something you can even admit to yourself, because it implies a universe that’s far too wide and far too deep to be comfortable in.

It’s been enough years, I guess, and everybody involved except me is dead. I’m eighty now, and I ain’t got much longer left. So, it’s as good a time as any. You won’t believe me, and I wouldn’t expect you to. When Muriel, God rest her, asked me about it I just changed the subject. Maybe it was them suit guys, and maybe it was just the idea of being sent to the funny farm, but I didn’t want to talk about the Chopping Night. But I saw what I saw, and I’ll go to my grave with that night floating in my memories.

The first thing I reckon you got to understand is what kind of man Marv McMurphy was, even before the Chopping Night. To sum it up: he was an ugly guy married to a beautiful woman. Loretta McMurphy was as gorgeous as a dream, and nobody could blame Marv for being jealous. But suspicion worked on Marv like one of them cocaine speedballs, making him powerful gungy whenever another man was within a hundred feet of his baby girl. When he came into Chad’s on Friday and Saturday nights, you had better not give his lady a look if she were with him. I had seen Marv lay one or two of the boys out on the floor for making eyes at Loretta and he beat Pete Bigelow half to death for giving Loretta a whistle. The sheriff had threatened him and Chad had talked of barring him, but Marv was a dangerous guy to cross and everybody in town knew it.

Poor Loretta. For a pretty woman, she never seemed to have no fun. I reckon she was about twenty-five then, but you could tell three childless years with Marv was aging her prematurely. I saw lines forming around her mouth and eyes, her skin folding under the pressure of being shackled to that crazy fool. Why she married him I can’t figure, but he had a miser’s love for her affection.

The other thing you got to understand is Carl Bannon. He was twenty-something, but what he did in the two decades before he wandered into town will forever be a mystery. He was a drifter who just blew in one day and was a quiet kind’a fellow who never talked much. The town was always small, and everybody knew everybody, so an out-and-out stranger like Carl stood out like a sore thumb. My best friend, Dusty Stalburg, said he just showed up in his office at the garage one day, hands in his pockets, looking kinda lost. He was dressed in faded denim with long, tangled blonde hair and a fidgety look to him.

“What you need, boy?” Dusty asked.

“Lookin’ for a job.”

“What makes you think I need anybody, son?”

The kid swallowed. “I’m good with my hands. I can show you.”

When I saw you for the first time, you were an old woman, and I was only six. My shoulder had briefly collided with your hip, and for that short stretch of contact, the world went soft in my vision–not soft like fur, but foamy and sticky, like a bubble bath, like someone clapped a handful of suds over my ears. You kept walking, but I saw you stumble. It was enough to know you were feeling it, too. You had felt the stretch of earth beneath us dip only a fraction lower, enough to catch the toe of your clogs.

I kept watching as you shuffled away. You were like every other old granny I’d ever seen, down to the way you dressed: a frumpy blouse that came all the way up to your collarbone and a pair of cut-off pants that flared out at your shins. With each step, the drooping beads that connected to your glasses swished back and forth until they disappeared into the crowd along with you.

My limbs were suddenly slick and heavy, like I’d been covered in oil. I wanted to laugh and vomit and scream at the same time. But the feeling had vanished with the sight of you, and I was left cross-eyed and panting.

It was my fault we’d bumped into each other. I was sidling behind the stalls of the weekly Farmer’s Market, far from where Dad had told me to stay, which was right next to him. He was selling some new pyramid scheme, and I could feel my insides souring amidst all the talk of weight loss and health benefits. I just had to leave.

There was a splash pad just beyond the homemade soap stall, the only relief from the unrelenting Florida sun. I wasn’t allowed in it, for a reason Dad changed every time. This week he’d said, “I just cleaned the car, Eve. I don’t want water stains on the seats.” Last week it was, “They just mowed the grass out there; you’ll get a rash.” Still, I was determined to get my feet wet, to wiggle my fingers through a geyser, before I rushed away with enough adrenaline to run a lap around the stalls.

When it all was said and done, I reluctantly perched on the lower rung of a wooden fence, facing the Farmer’s Market. Behind me, the splash pad was close enough to hear the fat feet smacking against the wet pavement. I squinted through the sun at the shuffling patrons and hoped a few more tiny drops from the sprinklers would land on my pink shoulders.

A flicker of light caught my eye, reflected off the flat metal that dangled from an earring. And there you were again, speaking gently to a vendor about sourdough. I observed you more carefully this time, somehow safer now that I was out of your sight.

Your skin collected around your eyes and mouth, the same way my dirty clothes piled on the floor of my bedroom, the clothes Dad yelled at me for. You were squinting against the sun, holding your knobby hand to the sky, and seeking respite in the shade of your fingers. Even from my distance, I could see the papery thin wrinkles of your skin, nearly translucent. Your hair, what was left of it, glowed white under the sun. Those shimmery blue earrings stretched your lobes like taffy.

The feeling was back, a gurgle of horror and wonder, but I had longer to feel it this time, longer to understand what it was screaming at me.

The same way birds know to fly, I knew you. Like somewhere beyond the reaches of my mind, you had always been standing there, quiet and dormant.

I wanted to be you, more than I wanted the splash pad, more than I wanted to stop coming to the Farmer’s Market every week. But beyond that desire, was something stronger, like a rope tethering us together. It wasn’t just that I wanted to be you. It was the realization that I already was you. And you—even though your stature curled in on itself, even though you struggled to hear the baker in front of you—were me.

My jaw went slack. The sun let up on its tirade. Even the beads of sweat that dripped down my neck stopped itching. I wanted to scream your name—our name—so you would look over and see me, so the hairs on your neck would stand at attention like mine had. But when I drew in a breath, the single syllable caught in my throat and I was suddenly terrified of confronting you.

I never got to. Dad’s strong hands yanked hard against the collar of my shirt, dragging me across splintering wood. I was not quick enough to catch myself on my feet, and even as the undersides of my legs burned, I was still searching for your face. Even when Dad raged on about wandering off, his words hit me like styrofoam, crumbling to nothing at my feet.

The next time I saw you, I was ten and wandering the aisles of the grocery store. Dad was waiting outside because a young couple caught him shoving ramen noodles into his blue jeans a few weeks before that. Earlier, we’d bummed for change in the parking lot, where the pavement was hot enough to warp the air around it. I spent the entire time hoping he’d make at least ten dollars so we could get the real hot dog buns instead of the white bread that caked to the roof of my mouth.

We only made six dollars, so I went in and collected as much ramen and hot dogs as I could afford. I was soaking up the last few moments of crisp, recycled air, and there you were, the figure in front of me, pushing a grocery cart down the baking aisle. Four years different, with haphazardly chopped hair that framed your face in wisps that glowed like a dying light bulb. Like there was almost nothing left.

You were dressed like a teacher: a white, puffy blouse tucked into a gray pin-striped skirt. I tried to imagine the version of myself that would stretch the hips of a skirt, the version of myself with shoes that went clunk, clunk when I walked between rows of school desks, with a wallet that had money in it before the parking lot.

A stranger with my face. I pressed my fingers into my cheek, searching for the sharp bones that framed your eyes, but there was only soft, squishy pudge.

You paused at the end of the aisle. Had you felt the air change? I could see your muscles tensing, like you were about to glance over your shoulder, and the terror returned like instinct. I headed straight for the parking lot, dropping crinkly plastic wrappers like breadcrumbs behind me. When Dad scowled at my empty arms, I told him I’d gotten caught stealing Tic Tacs.