The Burden We Bear

The funeral was over, the casseroles had stopped coming, and Elena found herself at the Rusty Kingdom roadside attraction at 2 PM on a Tuesday, staring at a fiberglass sphinx that was missing half its face. Some teenagers had bashed its nose in years ago. Now it grinned lopsidedly, like it knew a joke she wasn't in on.

'You going to buy a ticket or just stand there?' The attendant chewed tobacco with his mouth open. He looked like he'd been working there since the Nixon administration. A zombie of a man, dead behind the eyes but somehow still upright.

Elena paid eight dollars and walked through the gates. She'd come for the bear.

It was in the back, past the overgrown miniature golf course, half-submerged in a green-tinged pond. A real Kodiak, the sign claimed, preserved by taxidermy in 1974. It stood on its hind legs, mouth frozen in a permanent roar, its glass eyes catching the afternoon sun. Swimming in that stagnant water, the bear had become something else entirely—part monster, part tragedy, entirely ridiculous.

Her father had loved this place. He'd brought her here every summer as a child, before the drinking got bad, before the silence filled their house like toxic gas. He'd point at that dead bear and say, 'That's strength, Ellie. That's what it takes to survive in this world.'

Now he was dead too, and Elena was forty-one with a marriage that had imploded six months ago. The house was quiet. The silence had a texture, like wool against her skin. Some days she felt like a goldfish in a bowl—circling the same plastic castle, forgetting what she'd seen three seconds ago, somehow surprised each time by the artificial plants.

The bear's left paw was coming loose. Someone had tried to fix it with duct tape. Elena stepped closer to the pond's edge, close enough to see her own reflection in the murky water. The woman looking back had hollow eyes and a mouth that forgot how to smile.

'What are you waiting for?' she whispered to the bear. 'What's the riddle?'

The sphinx had its riddle. This bear just had its roar, forever frozen, forever unanswered. Elena understood that now. Some questions don't have answers. Some wounds don't heal—they just scar over, and you learn to bear the weight of them.

She turned away from the pond, from the dead bear and its pointless roar, from the sphinx with its broken face. The zombie attendant waved as she left.

Elena got in her car and drove home. The house would be quiet. She would circle the rooms like a goldfish, forget what she was looking for, find herself surprised by sunlight on the floorboards. And tomorrow she would do it again. That was the riddle's answer, she realized. The surviving. That was the roar she needed to learn.