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Tommy Bear is a Good Neighbour

Linda waits at the counter, trying not to look impatient while Barry and Hank gossip. Linda hates Barry’s Corner Store, but she doesn’t have a car. She can’t go to the big supermarket.

Barry says to Hank, “The word bear isn’t the real word for them – did you know that?”

Everyone knows this, Linda thinks, but she says nothing. Barry continues, saying that ‘bear’ is an Anglo-Saxon euphemism meaning ‘the brown one’. Barry says that olden-days people believed that saying the true word for bears would make them appear. As Barry goes on, the door opens. Linda sighs, hoping that a new customer will force Barry to get a move on.

It’s actually Tommy Bear who’s walked in. Linda pretends to ignore him, just as she’s pretending not to be frustrated with Barry. She glances at Tommy Bear though – his hair, brown flecked with grey, his clothes loose coverings on top of the fur. He is filling a basket with tins of beans, packs of cheap mince. She can imagine him taking this back to his flat to eat it all raw.

Hank pays for his shopping, and it’s now Linda’s turn. She hears Tommy Bear picking out more goods behind her. Linda knows she needs to pay attention as Barry rings up her shopping, making sure his fingers don’t accidentally slip and overcharge her, as they sometimes do. But, as Barry turns a tin of soup, searching for the price, she looks at Tommy Bear once more. He is choosing between different brands of honey. At this distance, his claws look like fingers, less of a threat than from further away.

Barry gives her the final price, and she pays with her card, knowing that it annoys him – a ‘Cash is King’ sign is taped to the cash register. She leaves the shop without acknowledging Tommy Bear.

But she thinks about him as she walks down the High Street. A week ago, she bumped into him on her way home from yoga. She asked how he was settling into the neighbourhood, and he shared his concerns in his gruff voice, doing his best to get the words out. She’d used the cold evening as an excuse to invite him back to hers for a cup of tea. She’d known when she asked that she wouldn’t even turn the kettle on.

That night, in her bed, Tommy Bear talked about the name for bears. Over the years, he said, humans had forgotten the real one, but the bears themselves remembered. Tommy whispered this word to Linda. She called it out in the night, loud enough that he shushed her, not wanting anyone else to hear. Afterwards, in the dark, Tommy Bear had told Linda that anyone could pick their own secret names.

Linda is only a short way from the shop. She turns back, hoping to catch Tommy Bear. She will ask him to come around again, maybe for dinner this time.

Background

This is a piece from my writing group. The theme was ‘bear’ and I wanted to write about this weird quirk of linguistics, which has been stuck in my head since reading about it in 2020 on Matt Webb’s blog Interconnected.

I love euphemisms and I’m smug about the title of this piece. I like the different interpretation that the title puts on the story.

Meta

I stopped sending out emails on Substack in November. The routine felt a little too much and I was burned out with work. But I found that I liked not sending emails less than I liked the routine. Things are on a more even keel with work now, so let’s see how we go.

I moved this letter from Substack to Buttondown, which turned out to be dead easy, although it’s no longer free for me. I did this partly because of the Nazi thing, but also because Substack was turning into a social media site. I’ve left all social media over the past few months, not wanting to have my attention controlled by algorithms. (I’m still on LinkedIn, of course, because I’m a corporate man to the bitter end).

I feel awkward about how social media provides scores for everything I do and demands I draw attention to myself. My tolerance for my own writing and marketing it is minimal. I’ve accumulated a few dozen readers on here, and I’m happy with that. I’m delighted to have a small audience of people who read and respond. So, thank you.

Who I Am

If you’ve been forwarded this mail, hello! I’m James, and I write microfictions. I feel tiny stories are the best way to describe our weird, fragmented world.

You can subscribe to this list on Buttondown. I have an ebook short story collection, Famous for 15 People, and a print collection, True Clown Stories. You can find some story-zines on Etsy, alongside the annual Mycelium Parish News that I produce with Dan Sumption. I also have an ongoing project, The South Downs Way, featuring stories set along that trail. I produce an annual horror story advent calendar.