if you could hold up her threadbare coat to the light where it's worn, translucent in places, you'd see spots where almost every night of the year bear had been mending, suspending that baseness. now her coat drags through the water, bagging, with a life's-worth of hunger, limitless minnows in the magnetic embrace, balletic and glacial of bear's insatiable shadow. left there! left there! when bear left bear. left there! left there! when bear stepped clear of bear.