Ike heard the nose. It started at his feet and snorted between his legs. It shnuffed and panted over his body and sounded like a person getting ready to tell a secret as it moved closer to his ear. He felt the warmth of the bear’s breath and closed his eyes. There was snow on his wrists between his mittens and his jacket, and he thought about the skin there, how it got red and itched by the fire while his mom cooked him oatmeal and when she wasn’t feeling lonely played the spoons, rattling the backs of the silverware against her knee, then down between her fingers, until she got a rhythm together and she could sing. The nose was at his crotch again. He listened to the bear walk away.

He stayed there in the snow for a long time. When he raised his head, it was dusk. In the distance he saw a snowmobile coming, but he couldn’t bring himself to move. Ike tells me sometimes you have these experiences, and you spend the rest of your life thinking about them. Try to shut out what happened and it comes back stronger, a nagging unease, an unanswerable question, and you have to go through it all over again.

Marysue likes it when I pet her tongue. It is a large and frightening muscle, and as I rub my hand across it I try not to think about her swallowing my arm. I use my left, thinking that I would not miss it as much as my right. I take the hose and start a final rinse down her side. The coarse black hairs growing out from between the wrinkles in her skin hang dripping with the weight of the water. I think of these hairs later that night when I am home safe and sound and stepping out of a hot shower, having washed all the animal smells off from the day. I run the towel underneath my arms, across my chest, and down each of my legs. When I reach my toes, I dry thoroughly between them and think about my ex-wife again. Step there.

I met her in a bar in Las Vegas. She was in for a convention, a gathering of nurses who’d worked in mobile hospitals during Vietnam. I was pouring drinks. She told me a story about how she saved a guy’s life in a restaurant with a steak knife and a ballpoint pen, performing a tracheotomy between courses. I watched her throat as she drank her martini, the way the glands clutched and moved along her neck. Cutting him was instinctive, she said, and I leaned across the bar and kissed her.