Each year in early June I pay a visit to my mother. She is a very old bear. She lives up north deep inside the rainforest of the peninsula. She has no friend. She growls a lot. But when she sees her only child, she is full of tenderness. She holds me tight in her furry forelegs, then with her heavy claws still resting on my shoulders, she greets me in Wa’louht. I can no longer speak Wa’louht. I know some words, but we communicate mostly through gestures and with our eyes. I can barely remember how to greet her back. I was too young when I left. My jaws have too much of a human shape. I can’t articulate clearly some of the consonants. She calls me Quitloc, it means “blackberry” in Wa’louht. Before I was taken away from her, the last summer I spent with her, I used to gorge on blackberries in August in the forest near the river Tl’la. My mother’s name is Shââ-pek. It means “black.”

 

Because I lack so many words, I could never find the courage to tell her that I was no longer king. It would have been impossible to explain and it would have caused her so much pain. She believes that, in the small kingdom south of her peninsula in which her son rules, all his subjects, though born of women, learn in school the languages of crows, wolves and bears. They form a cluster of resistance against humans. I never told her how they persecuted me. It is a miracle that I am still alive though my father has been dead now for eleven years.

 

Today, I wander. I hide. I try to shave every day the thick red fur that invades my cheeks, my forehead, my neck, the back of my hands. But it grows back thicker than ever, even all through the summer. So, during the warmer months, I wear a large Panama hat and a brown silk scarf. Very few people remember that I exist, yet I still live in fear of being arrested by an agent of the new regime. Because I am only half human, I would not deserve the same type of long trial that they gave my father. Creatures that share blood and allegiance to both realms, they usually burn. A royalist clandestine network that once upon a time used to support my father stays in touch with me. They hide me and feed me in times of need. They all know my weakness for blackberry muffins made of corn flour and raw pine and thyme honey. I write sad poems in small notebooks that I sign under the nom de plume Ursula Sylvester. When they are ready, I copy them as neatly as I can on the insides of discarded cardboard boxes I collect near supermarkets. I send them to a small press, Black Cedar, founded nearly five decades ago now by a distant cousin of my mother, a bear with human blood, like me. I heard rumors that they still secretly translate poems in Wa’louht and bring small poetry books in the forests and near rivers and hide them inside the trunks of designated oaks and old cedars, under specific stones. It would be the greatest honor for me if one day by chance I would find one of these secret collections with a poem of mine in it. But I also worry that one day by chance my mother will find buried in the trunk of a cedar a translation of one of my most despairing ghazals of exile. What will happen if she reads it and finds out the truth about me?

 

My deepest wish would be that she would let me stay with her in the forest forever. I want her to allow me to hibernate with her, buried in between her furry large claws, together deep in a cave in the mountains. I want to learn Wa’louht again, the language with one hundred consonants and four vowels, that can imitate the song of the great sequoias in the wind and all the delicate complex sounds of the ice breaking on the surface of the river in early March. I want to live among millenary cedars.

 

But instead, after three days spent with her, I mumble with my defective Wal’hout syntax I must go. It is time. My kingdom is waiting. My mother gives me each summer two red snail shells that I must keep in my pockets always for protection. Their presence serves to remind me that time is a spiral and that her love for me stays at the center of the shell. I clench my hairy fists in my pockets. I stare at the tree roots that spread all underneath and around us. I can’t look at her. I don’t thank her. I don’t say a word. I don’t want to go.

 

 

 

Lucie Bonvalet is a writer, visual artist, and teacher. Her prose and poetry can be found in Catapult, Puerto del Sol, 3AM, Hobart, Michigan Quarterly Review, Entropy and elsewhere. Her drawings and paintings can be found in Old Pal Magazine and on Instagram.