Featured in Farrago Magazine Edition Two 2026 as part of the Beth and the Bear column

Design by Marc Lebon

Chapter One

Beth tossed and wriggled until noon, when the friction-turned-heat in her bedroom became unbearable, and she woke with a gasp. She had dreamt herself running and she could feel the earth turning under her feet. She had felt powerful and scared and out of breath and tired. As she stared blearily at her ceiling, Beth was sure it had been someone else sleeping in her skin, something else, leeching off her rest while she had to run.

Beth’s room smelt of human-being, warmth and dust. She could have drawn the curtain and opened her window, which was what she would have done had she been the vivacious protagonist of a romcom or musical. But Beth’s room was barely ten centimetres from a corrugated iron fence, and she couldn’t bear to look at ugly things before breakfast. Instead, she turned on her lamp. She preferred dim orange to the harshness of daylight anyway. Her eyes glowed yellow and darted over her desk until they settled on their goal: her dainty purple jewellery box. She turned it over and twirled the key-like crank before deciding on the day’s earrings. A skinny pink ballerina leapt up and twirled to off-key Tchaikovsky. Beth never knew whether silver or gold suited her better. The ballerina slowed as she pondered, and Beth wound her up again.

Beth worked at a pub near her mother’s house, where she had intermittently lived throughout her twenties. She almost went to school, but had missed every deadline ever set for her, which didn’t bode well for applications. She was a habitual creature, and her only habits were waking, working and looking at her glorious, infinite, sticky phone. If someone had asked her, Beth would say she was a waitress, although that wasn’t technically true. ‘Waitress’ was too gendered, so in an out-of-character equality effort, The Sovereign Hotel entitled Beth the infinitely less sexy ‘food runner’. Waitress was the backstory of a down-on-her-luck woman, working to support herself before she got to be an exorbitantly wealthy movie star. Despite having no desire to be an actress, Beth supposed that, if she were to become a movie star, it would make the eleven years of waitressing worth it. If she didn’t, then she would just have been a food runner. 

Her shift passed, dim and fuzzy. She moved rhythmically. It was satisfying: pass to table, punch docket, back to pass, pass to table, punch docket, back to pass, stack glasses. Toilet down the corridor to your left, sir; sir; ma’am; thank you, sir; enjoy, ma’am. Back to pass. She used the customer bathroom. There was a staff-specific one out the back, but its harsh lights were blades to her eyes. The customer’s lights were dim and kind.

Later, clocked off, Beth didn’t stay to drink with her coworkers. She worked with a lot of good-looking people, who all skilfully navigated social interactions with ease and beauty. Beautiful people freaked Beth out. The way they all laughed, so beautiful and in sync. Too beautiful was as offensive as too ugly. So, she left, averagely. She didn’t absorb the trip home. The world moved around her, jumpy, and then she was home, looked at her phone, fell asleep. 

Running again. With others, not quite human, but not distinctly animal either. Just a some-kind-of-thing. She moved, and the world moved around her. She ran. She ran and she ran into the path of a great grizzly bear. It reared up her. She jolted awake. Her ceiling greeted her, cracked and patiently waiting to be stared at. All was silent but the dull buzz of household electricity. She breathed in four, like an old psychologist suggested. She held it for as long as she could, which was unlikely to be psychologically advisable, but something to do. She caught her breath and noticed that her room’s musty smell, that never changes, had changed. There was something warm, something inhaling her exhale. She hauled herself upward, and there, at the foot of her bed, rearing up at her, was the bear of her dreams. Ferocious and huge, it reached the ceiling and spanned wall to wall. Its mouth agape, its paws sporting ten knife-like claws, curved, yellowed and striking at Beth. Something in her mind fought for survival, tried to retrieve bear information, tried to make Beth run. But panic couldn’t cut through the thick night. Her head was too heavy. Every thought scrambled before it fully formed. It was too hard. There was a bear in her bedroom. Beth lay down and floated back to friendly oblivion.