Bear love - short story

STRANGE MAGIC

Bear Love

It was almost love at first sight. They both had come out of marriages that had simply run its course and each and all had grown apart and having been on their own for about a year, it was a complete surprise to find feelings that had lain dormant for so long. Penny and John had so much in common, although Penny did not have children but it wasn't long before she lavished all her love on John. John did have children who had since left home and one child living with an ex wife, but had plenty of spare love for Penny. It wasn't long before John sold his house and moved in with Penny spending all his spare cash on her house and had a wonderful wedding in Las Vegas complete with Elvis droning out a love song as if to cement their love.

He often surprised her with little cards and gifts and one day, after a long tiresome day at work he gave her a 'Forever friends' bear with the words 'I love you' inscribed on it. Penny was over the moon that she had met such a thoughtful and loving partner and loved the bear as much as she loved John. She even named the bear John affectionately after her husband and often picked the bear up to remind her of how wonderful life was.

She depended on John for almost everything and he felt so proud that he was loved and respected so much. She always made sure there was a meal on the table for John at the end of a working day.

Things were almost perfect, but Penny was a bit of a spend thrift and John did worry at times that she made too much use of her credit cards. Penny carried on working in IT and John was self employed repairing computers, which he was very good at and brought in a fair income.

After a couple of years, Penny was promoted to a managerial position, but it meant more hours i the office, more hours sitting in gridlock on the way to work and on the way home. There was less time together at the weekends which were met with tiredness and stress and Penny put more pressure on John to do more things around the house as his working week was fewer than hers. She started to want for more and more material things and they seemed to get bigger and more expensive. She also started a collection of Teddy bears; some big, some small, some thin, some fat in all different shapes and sizes, in all different colours and from all over the world. Not only did they seem to growing number, but they seemed to get more and more expensive and in time, the Teddy bear collection took over their spare bedroom. It was if Penny was obsessed by the bears and she seemed to lavish more love and time on them than she did John, although John still loved her deeply, but he felt she was turning away from him. John now depended on Penny as she wanted him to remain at home and keep the house spotless, look after their huge pedigree dog, Jasper and make sure there was a meal on the table when she arrived home after her day at work.

The Teddy Bears were bought so frequently, that they started living in different parts of the house and poor John hardly had room to take home computers to fix. *

Now there were even more bears in the bathroom, the study, the kitchen and in all the bedrooms.

The marriage was not really working out. Apart from the collection of Teddy bears, Penny was getting more and more into debt and kept making extravagant gestures at every opportunity; an expensive perfume for a girlfriend of her sisters son who had only been together for a couple of months. A diet of powder promising weight loss that ran into hundreds and hundreds of pounds, the newest treatment in dentistry. The list was endless and John was quite literally pulling his hair out as he had always been so thrifty and sensible with money he did not quite knowing which way to turn. He tried talking to her, reasoning with her, but she did not understand what point he was trying to make until eventually, the only compromise was for John to virtually live his own life and try to shut his eyes to his wife's' obsessions. Apart from the Teddy bears, Jasper always seemed to be the centre of her world and John felt as if he was just there for the sake of convenience, although Penny did say she loved him, but only, it seemed when it suited her.

The Teddy Bear collection continued to grow until they spilled over into almost every room in the house. The bears were taking over and for each room he walked in was a painful reminder of Penny's' spending that was seriously out of control. She simply could not help herself. It seemed the more she spent on bears, the more control she had on her life, not realising how completely out of control she really was. She just couldn't stop buying bears.

Life plodded on and poor John found himself going through the same daily routine, to gently dust around the bears, which monopolised every room in the house now and made sure Jasper had his two long daily walks. Life had become a knife edge for him as it seemed now he had used his equity from his old house into hers and as a result, there was no more spare cash to throw around and he felt so trapped.

Sometimes he wished the house, the bears and his wifes' continuing shopping sprees would just vanish into the air and looked up to the sky in vain.

He carried on with life as best as he knew how and carried on bringing home computers to fix and used what little room he had in the spare room. He soak tested one particular problematic computer until he was satisfied it was working, switched it off and unplugged it before he left the house before taking Jasper out for one of his daily walks and wondered how life would have been if he hadn't remarried and stayed on his own with his own space with peace and quiet. After a couple of hours, he stated walking towards the direction of his home and heard the sound of the sirens somewhere in the far distance and he saw smoke so thick and dense, the whole road and beyond was cordoned off. As John drew nearer to the growing crowds, he realised with profound horror that it was his own house that was on fire. Different coloured chunks of fur in every hue - yellow, pink, brown, black, white, purple and red were flying high up in the sky in a giant plume and slowly raining down on all the surround streets and people were amazed at what was spewing out from that house. It was endless and as more and more crowds gathered, they wondered what on earth was burning so vibrantly. The fumes from the house smelt horribly indescribable as those Teddy bears met their grizzly end. It continued to burn for hours on end and made the national news. It brought so much intrigue and interest from far and wide. More crowds gathered around as their array of colours could be seen from as far away as all the home counties around London and could even be seen quite clearly on satellite. It was an awesome sight as the evening turned to dusk as the giant multi coloured plume lit up the night sky.

After many hours, the fire was finally under control and John and Penny were forced to go and stay with relatives until such time it was safe to go back to their house.

The house was in a complete mess and would take many weeks of tidying and redecorating. There was so much fur and stuffing from the Teddy bears and Penny broke down uncontrollably as she pick up what was once an eye or an arm or leg. The most bizarre thing was it was only the bears that had been destroyed in the fire, apart from the the smoke and soot damage in the rest of the house. As she wondered around the rooms, she heard a faint, gentle, but eerie laughter coming from the corner of the room from where one of Johns' P.C.s' that he had been trying to repair. As she walked close, there on top of that P.C. sat the little 'Forever friends' bear that John had bought her all those years ago and as she picked him up, she was so sure that the bear wore a smile that was not there before.

She was never told that those bears were not fireproof; in fact she had purchased thousands of pounds worth of useless cheap stuffed toys.

It was a mystery as to how the fire started, but it was suggested that a faulty computer had been plugged in and switched on that delivered a fatal spark, but John found himself looking up into the sky saying, 'Thank you'.

Now Penny depends on John as she took a pay cut, altered her hours, so she did not have to sit in gridlock going to and coming home from work and now spends more time at home. The weekends are spent taking jasper for a walk together. She puts a meal on the table for John after a hard day at work and thanks God that she is grateful for her humble fundamental surrounding s and once again, he 'Forever friends' bear take pride of place on her chest of draws in their bedroom often picking him up to remind her how life should be.

Copyright Linda Lawrence

 2^nd August 2006