The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer

real, there is no chance that anyone would ever believe Aunt Etta really tied a talking rabbit to a post and, dressed in her Sunday best, had someone take a photograph of her with the rabbit. No one will ever know that I was there, too, or what happened after.
    I came to my senses a few minutes after I'd hit Aunt Etta for the last time. She was making little broken sounds in the dirt and had a big, bleeding dent in her forehead. Her eyes were open but glassy, as if she had already turned inward. Every couple of minutes her body would convulse. I knew that I had hurt her badly.
    I'd dropped the post and was babbling to Sensio as I held him against my chest. We'd escape together. We'd hide out in the orange groves, or we'd make our way to Key West and hide out there, like I'd seen in a movie once. Or maybe we'd even travel to Tampa and find the circus woman and she'd help us out. "She liked you, Sensio," I remember telling him. "She'd definitely help us." As if I were an adult, or had any money, or any sense.
    After a while I realized Sensio wasn't answering, which to me, in that state, meant he didn't agree. Slowly, a cold, clear mood came over me, and I knew what we had to do, what we could do to survive this together.
    I scuffed up the trail from the photo shoot to where Aunt Etta's body lay to make it harder to tell what had happened. I used leaves and a branch to obscure any of my footprints. I took the post with me, and later burned it. Then I went back to the bungalow, treated Sensio's wounds, and put him in his cage, telling him, "No matter what questions they ask, don't say anything." I thought I saw him nod.
    Then I had the operator call the foreman at the bar and told him I'd found Aunt Etta, "beaten up by someone." The foreman called an ambulance and the police, and came barreling back in his ancient truck. I was bawling by Aunt Etta's side just like a kid of twelve would bawl if she found her aunt brutally attacked and left for dead. I did it because I had to, yes, but also because by then the madness had left me and I was truly sorry.

    As the ambulance took Aunt Etta away to three months in a coma followed by brain death, the policeman on the scene asked me, "Have you see anyone you don't know around here lately?"
    Through my sobs and hiccupping and snot, I told him that an old man with a face like weather-beaten leather and missing an eye had come looking for Aunt Etta, but I'd only seen him the once. I figured telling them the man was missing an arm, too, would be laying it on too thick.
    "Could you identify him if you saw him again?" the policeman asked. He was in his late forties, losing his hair, and had a kindly voice that made me feel bad.
    Yes, I nodded, although I knew they'd never find him.
    After they'd finished questioning me, I stayed with the foreman's family for a few weeks before being picked up and sent back north to live with the cousin who hadn't wanted me before. I guess the sympathy money A. C. Pittman threw at him made me more appealing. I even got to take Sensio with me, in a little cage in the backseat next to me. No one was willing to tell the girl who had suffered such a trauma that she couldn't keep her only friend in the world.
    I talked to Sensio the whole way up, but in the way a child might to an imaginary friend so the cousin, who smelled of too much cologne and was throwing me strange glances from the driver's seat, wouldn't get too concerned. Sensio didn't answer me. That was okay, I reasoned. He'd suffered a trauma, too. It would take time for both of us to recover.
    The same newspapers that had ignored Aunt Etta when she'd tried to sell them on a talking rabbit, now splashed the details of her injuries all over their pages, referring in lurid tones to the mysterious man I'd described for the police. They even interviewed the photographer, whose account of that day didn't include the fact that he'd witnessed Sensio talk. But the man did leave the strong impression that Aunt Etta