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They sat around the small campfire, each silent, each with his thoughts. _Five Characters in Search of an Exit,_the old bear remembered, except that there were six here tonight. He'd met that actor, the one who played the major, who had met the clown, and the hobo, and the bagpiper, and the ballerina. This was a different cast, of course - the old bear, the young weasel, the crotchety marmoset, the forgetful otter, the lithe ocelot, and the battered stag. There was no one else on the plateau, no one around to see, or to hear, to know or remember. Beyond, in the night sky, a bare fraction of the billion billion suns in the universe could be seen. Occasionally, surrealistically, a streak tore through part of the panorama, silent as a life unrequited, as the vast beast-whistle of space absorbed the light, the heat, the sound in the vacuum that could never be filled, a vacuum almost as large as that which lay within each of those who sat around the fire, equidistant from the flames, from each other, from life itself.

None was who he thought he was.

"How do we do this?" the stag asked in the naked silence.

"We tell stories," the bear responded.

"Why?"

"What else do you do around a campfire?"

"Out of marshmallows?" the weasel sneered.

"Out of time," the otter whispered.

"Why don't you go first?" the old bear asked the weasel.

"Only an utter idiot goes first."

"I repeat my question."

"I'll go first." The otter sitting just to the right of the bear, an older, gray-furred female who seemed to be elsewhere, looked around her surroundings, seeing and gazing at anything other than the other five pairs of eyes who locked onto her with the relief of the greedy who were not yet caught. "I shouldn't be here."

"Who invited you?" the crotchety marmoset spat.

"Who ever invites us?" she wondered softly, then frowned, her tail moving slowly behind her, as if it hurt somehow. Sensitive ears around the campfire detected popping noises that didn't come from the flaming logs before them. "I'm not sure how I got here."

"Or why." The weasel seemed calm on the outside, but he'd had a lot of practice at seeming to be something else. The important thing was for him to make sure no one noticed.

"We know why. To tell stories." The otter seemed to gather herself. "Mine started with my mother dying as I was born. I wondered if she was too weak to bear me, or too ashamed. Maybe she gave herself to me. I've always felt older. Always."

"Who raised you?" the stag asked softly.

"My father, and his wife." She let the implication settle on the air. "When Daddy died, I was twelve, or maybe thirteen. There was no birth certificate, so I was never sure what year I was born in. Celeste - she never let me call her Mother - started to vent the rage she had built up over so long. I wasn't even safe at school; she'd let everyone know about Daddy, about me. I was only safe on Sundays."

"Why Sundays?" the marmoset asked.

"A church on the poor side of town. Across the railroad tracks, literally. They welcomed me there. I played piano for them."

"Were you religious?" The stag shifted, leaning his elbows on his knees, short tail-tuft bobbing, his horns dark even against the firelight.

"I must have thought I was." The otter looked into the burning logs as if hoping to read some answer there. "It was wartime, and I started corresponding with an Army captain - a greyhound, a doctor. We talked on paper, and he was having trouble with a wife and son back home. We didn't do anything, there was no affair; after all, he was overseas. But he came back and divorced her, and we married, and I never went back to that town again."

"Happily ever after," the weasel sneered.

"No." The reply was soft. "He wasn't who he was."

The stag shook his head. "I don't understand."

"He gave his name to our first child, the first of his dynasty. The child lived only a few days. His son by his first wife, while still a teen, wrecked his motorcycle and died; the mother died not long after, I don't remember how. Only a year after our first child, I bore a female for him. This, somehow, was my fault. For the next nine years, he took me only when I was in heat, and I miscarried seven times. The last, finally, was a male. He was six weeks overdue, as if he didn't want to face my husband. He was the last child. My husband never touched me again."

"How did you survive?" the bear wondered.

"I didn't." The otter shifted, slowly, old bones grinding against one another, her once lithe form long since passed. "I escaped him by drinking. My daughter left for college in a distant town; she found the first male she could tolerate and married him. My son was gay, so there would be no more heirs for my husband. When the drink began to fail, when he fought me over it, I stopped drinking... but my mind found its own escape. They called it Alzheimer's. My husband put me into a home, forced drugs that prevented the disease from getting either better or worse, so I lived in a haze of knowing nothing with any certainty, for three years." She looked up at the others. "Because he loved me."

The battered stag lowered his head, as if to cry. The marmoset brought out a pad of paper and scribbled something on it, scratched it out, scribbled again, as if choosing words. Shrugging, the young weasel returned his gaze to the fire, apparently not having much reaction at all. The bear only nodded.

"Outlived the old bastard, though" the otter said. "Not that I knew it."

"And your children?"

"Three males and fourteen years of abuse later, my daughter divorced her husband, who made it as ugly as possible. She found another, spent another fourteen years of a different kind of abuse, and is on her own now. She is who she is. My son... I don't know what really happened to him."

"Drink?" the marmoset asked.

"You'd know plenty about that," the bear observed.

"Shut your mouth."

"You'll have your turn." Turning to the otter, looking at how gray and haggard she appeared, the bear asked gently, "Is that your story?"

"I think so." She frowned. "No. Something else. Something about my son. About my husband and my son."

"Were they close?"

"I don't think you could call it that."

"Abuse?" The weasel seemed curious for the first time.

The otter shook her head slowly, realizing. "No... no one ever called it that, either."

The bear nodded. "No one ever would." He sighed a little and reached down into the darkness beside him. Raising his outstretched arm slowly, he brought the pistol up to shoulder-level and shot the otter squarely between the eyes. The sound shattered the night as she was thrown backward off of the low rock she had been sitting upon, coming to rest with a muffled thump on the soft sand behind her. Leaping to their hindpaws, the remaining onlookers could not decide which was the more terrifying: That there was a smile on her muzzle, or that the body was that of a greyhound.

"So," the bear said quietly, still seated. "Who wants to go next?"

"Are you insane?" the marmoset squealed like a terrified female mouse.

"Not the last time I checked, no." The bear considered the gun in his paw. "Rather the opposite, I think."

The ocelot, seated immediately to the bear's left, started to move toward him; the bear fired one shot into the air. She fell back against her rock, quivering like a plucked string.

"That's two. How many in the magazine?"

The stag, standing across from the bear, eyed him carefully. "Glock 17; at least 15 more, unless it's modified."

The bear nodded. "Thank you for identifying it for me. I wasn't entirely sure." He looked the pistol over, noting how it fit his paw, as if seeing it for the first time. "Good. Plenty for tonight, I figure. Now... shall we all sit down again, please? So much more companionable that way. We have some more stories to tell, I think. Who shall be next?" He jutted a chin at the marmoset between the ocelot and the stag, who looked as if he sat down primarily because his legs had gone out from under him. "How about you? You've probably got an interesting story to tell."

"I don't... I don't know what you mean..."

"Sure you do." The bear spoke softly. The ocelot cowered at her place; the stag and weasel still stood, the stag more solidly, the weasel trying to drum up a look of righteous indignation to cover his inability to look calm. "I'm sure it's a fascinating story, no doubt beginning somewhere in the southern states of this great land. Isn't that where you started?"

"Mississippi." The crotchety old marmoset tried to have some pride in this.

"Yet you're known as a Texas Poet Lauriat, are you not? How did that happen?"

"Travel," the small monkey said softly. "That's how you grow - school, travel, opportunity..."

"...females, fun, fermented grains..."

"The poet's friend, enemy, muse... romance or rebound, hope or hopelessness..."

"You must have a good thesaurus."

"Travel is important," the weasel put out boldly. "I started in Oklahoma, wound up in California."

"As Will Rogers once said, the Oklahomans who moved to California raised the IQ of both places." The bear considered. "I was tempted to say that you'd be an exception, but that would be petty and untrue. All in good time. Tell me, marmoset. What took you to Texas?"

"A job opportunity. Professorship." The marmoset looked into the flames, blank-eyed save for the reflections of memory. "Three of us, actually, all at different colleges. All poets. All PhDs."

"Credentials. Always credentials."

"Only way to preserve academic excellence." Words spoken without emphasis, like a litany of long standing and little examination. "Publish or perish. Get recognition, get published, get reviews, get news, get popular. That's how it works."

"How did you publish?" the stag asked, finally allowing himself to sit.

"This was before the modern times; none of this Internet nonsense. No, we had to have chapbooks, magazines, scholarly journals. That's what it means to be published,really published - physical production, tangible proof." The monologue began to have the strident quality of the sophist. "You have to undergo the Darwinian process of being chosen based on your merit, on the merit of your presented work. That's why I founded my literary magazine at the university. Only the best work. Only the best poets and writers." He nodded slowly, his eyes still fixed on the fire. "That's how you build an academic reputation."

"What about your poet friends?" the weasel asked. "How'd they fare?"

"Both got professorships," the monkey said, something like pride in his voice. "Good colleges, and they created excellent magazines. Scholarly magazines, real literary magazines."

"With real literary work in them."

"Yes."

"Like yours."

The marmoset said nothing, his face unmoving.

"And naturally, since they were such excellent, literary poets, their work appeared in your magazine. And your favorite students, didn't they have work published there as well?"

"We always supported our best writers."

"Before or after they serviced their professors?"

"No one would make such an accusation."

"No, no one ever did. They wouldn't have been heard anyway. It wasn't always sexual seduction, after all; you're far too unimaginatively straight even to consider an alternative, unless it was with your fellow poetry-lovers and your fermented grains." The bear considered without rancor, without even raising his voice. "What about that, professor? A little Byron and Shelley in the library stacks?"

"That could be considered slanderous."

"Merely asking a question. Wondering about all the other of your students, of your would-be disciples, who apparently didn't work hard enough for you. They went on to publish elsewhere, didn't they? Didn't some few, in fact, become almost well-known?"

"Not in academic circles," said the Poet Lauriat of Texas, straightening his back a little. "Not where it mattered."

"Naturally. And the few who ended their own lives for the lack of their would-be success in your academic circles? And the many score who ended their creative lives because they believed your judgment of their work? The ones you ensured would never interfere with your mutually-conferred awards, your intercollegiate empire-building, your grants and emeritus and honorary standings?"

"Decades of hard work."

"And not a bit of it literary." The bear raised his arm again and fired, splintering the night air. The poet's body flew backward from its place; on the sand behind the rock, a razorback boar lay neat, a smile around his tusks, the blood pooling out beneath what was left of his head.

Again, the stag leapt to his hindpaws, the weasel a half-second after him, and again another shot was fired, this one into the campfire itself, sending up a shower of sparks that momentarily blinded the company. Holding the gun only slightly at bay, the bear softly said, "Lucky thirteen. Maybe."

"What the fuck are you doing?" the weasel screamed. Somewhere in the vague night breeze, there whispered the stink of sweat and urine. "What in Hell is this?"

"That's a bit warmer, but that itself would be a bad joke, a literary cliché, and I'm sure we can do better." With his empty forepaw, he gestured around the area. "What does it look like I'm doing?"

"Why are we here?" the lithe lady ocelot cowered and wrapped her arms about her middle, as befits the female in obvious distress. "Why did we come here?"

"Good question," the stag spoke, his voice the only one besides the bear's that remained steady. "Did you bring us here?"

"What do you remember?"

"Nothing."

"The hart remembers nothing." The bear smiled, perhaps for the first time. "What about the rest of you?"

Silence from the weasel and ocelot.

The bear shrugged easily. "For what it's worth, I don't remember coming here, either. I got here, somehow or another. I know why we're here, but that's really all I can tell you at this point."

"To tell stories," the stag repeated. "And you'll tell yours last?"

"Why would you say that?"

"Because two have told their stories, and you have killed them both. You seem to be judge, jury, executioner."

"Another good idea, but not entirely correct. Besides, if I'm last, who will hear my story?" The bear shifted his bulk on the rock, his empty forepaw gesturing for the two remaining males to sit down again. "Very well. I will make a bargain. A generous one, since I'm the one with the gun." His smile did not go all the way to his eyes. "I will tell you part of my story. I already have, actually, but I don't think any of you have figured that out quite yet. You have heard two stories told, and you have seen two masks taken away. Truth, you see, cannot have masks; once exposed, it only looks like itself. It's not always pretty. Truth can be ugly, but it must be faced. Like her."

The stag looked at the greyhound, or otter, or whatever she might really have been. "What did she do that deserved being killed for it?"

For a long moment the bear considered the fire; nothing moved but the indifferent flames. "I grew up in a house where no one told the truth. A lot of things happened, but no one ever talked about them. It was never anyone else's business, you see; it was private, family business. That's what I was always told. And the things that happened, they could be almost anything, as long as no one talked about it. That was the rule. Move along, nothing to see here." The large ursine breathed heavily. "When I made the mistake of talking about something, my punishment was to have it pointed out to me that my older brother never would have made that mistake, never would have done anything wrong, that he would have made my mother proud. After all, making a mistake was the unholy act that brought shame and disgrace upon the family, especially if someone found out about it, and my brother, my older brother, he never did anything wrong." He looked at the stag directly. "A pity that he lived such a short time. Difficult to compete with someone who never even had a chance to make a mistake."

"So you're really a greyhound?" the weasel spat. "Is that what you're trying to tell us?"

"Perhaps."

"That's not our problem."

"What is your problem? What's your story?"

"Who says I got one?"

"Everyone has a story. Everyone is a story."

"What are you talking about?"

"Your mate," the bear prompted. "You remember."

The young weasel seemed to sway on his hindpaws, his face becoming blank, uncertain. "So long," he said softly. "Long ago..."

"The universe has barely blinked. Tell me. Tell me about your mate."

"There was a summer," the weasel began, falling back upon his rock, his eyes fixed on the campfire. "A strange summer in college. Everything was new to me. I was... I had graduated high school so young, and everything... so different, so... I was meeting people, learning, understanding. I found him by accident. A group of people, talking, discussing. He introduced himself." Shifting his gaze, he said dully, "He was a bear."

The stag looked up sharply.

The bear only nodded. "How immensely interesting. Do go on."

"He was smart. I was a pup of about 19. From a podunk town in Oklahoma, to a college town in Oklahoma. Still small, still small-minded, still... Oklahoma. Not a lot of..." The weasel turned on the bear and all but shouted, "I was smart! That's why he talked to me! That's why..."

"I believe you."

"Why?"

"Hadn't you noticed? You can only tell the truth here. That's why we're telling stories - because the true stories haven't been told yet. Only our true stories. So keep going."

Even the stag resumed his seat at this point. His eyes lingered for a moment upon the lithe ocelot to one side, arms holding her middle, tail wrapped around her hindpaws, the one of the six who had said almost nothing within this true circle of deadly stories. He turned back to the otter as the young mustelid began to speak once again. "We spent a lot of time together that summer. We wrote together, worked on stories, even a novel, together, improvising our plots as we went along, a few paragraphs from him, a few from me, back and forth... We cooked together, watched shows together... We even slept together, but no sex. I told him I wasn't gay."

"Was he?" the stag enquired.

"I think he'd had sex with females, but he preferred males."

"Curious." The bear flicked a glance the ocelot. "One so often hears the other way around, doesn't one?"

The weasel said nothing for a long moment. The stag finally asked, "Why did you sleep with him?"

"Because..." His entire body shook as he tried to clamp his narrow, brown-furred muzzle shut, but the words eventually poured out from him as if under pressure of a geyser. "Because it was warm, and I was lonely, and he said he was lonely, and because I liked being with him. He was big and warm and lonely, and his life had learned so much, his mind had lived so much... We talked, about everything in the world, about ourselves and each other, and because holding him, touching him, was like touching something in me that I'd never known before."

"Then you were coming out?"

"I never said I was gay."

The stag looked at him carefully. "Are you gay?"

"Leading the witness," the bear intoned, then smiled oddly. "It's his story. Let him tell it."

"It was like that all summer." The weasel turned hate-filled eyes at the bear, black-tipped tail lashing in fury. "He left for a while, but I never... I didn't find anyone else. I looked, made friends, males and females, but nothing was like being with him, and I never slept with anyone else. We talked a lot on the phone." Shuddering again, the weasel tried to stop his voice, but he could not. "I slept with no one else until the next summer, when he returned to town. We rented a house together. We had our own rooms, but we still slept together a lot. And one night..."

Physically grabbing his muzzle with his forepaws, the weasel shook as if convulsing. The stag looked to the bear, to the ocelot, no one moved. He stood and moved toward the weasel, but the bear raised his forepaw - his empty forepaw, not the one with the Glock in it, yet the simple gesture was enough to make the hart pause in confusion and frustration.

"You have to say it." The bear spoke softly. "Your story wants to come out. Now."

"HE KISSED ME!" the weasel screamed, and began to weep.

The stag looked down at the weasel with something like incredulity. "Are you serious? That's the big secret you're keeping?"

Eyes filling with hate-filled tears, the weasel stared daggers at the stag. "Do you have any idea what that was like for me? I'd never done anything like that before!"

"You must have wanted it. Or did you tell him no and stop him? If he molested you, that's different, but otherwise..."

The mustelid seemed to leak out the anger as if lancing a boil. "I didn't tell him to stop."

"It was a kiss, you idiot," the hart objected yet again.

"Not just a kiss."

"What do you mean?"

"It was..." The weasel seemed to shrink inside himself again. "It was the kiss. The one I'd never had before. The one that meant something."

"How did that make you feel?" the bear asked mildly.

"Terrified."

"Why?" the stag asked. "The first kiss is usually a beautiful moment in a relationship. Did you have sex that night?"

"No."

"You wanted to wait?"

"I wanted..." The weasel began choking again, trying to block the words. "I wanted to... I wanted him, but I stopped... he didn't force anything."

"Sounds like a good guy. What scared you so much?"

"Didn't... couldn't... not right... couldn't let..."

"Did you want a female?" The lithe ocelot, for the first time, looked interested. "Normal males want a female, don't they?"

"Found one!" Forepaws balled into fists, the weasel hit himself in the head repeatedly. "Found one! Found one! Found one!"

The stag leaped from his space and restrained the young mustelid's arms to prevent him from actually hurting himself. The ocelot leaned forward from her place and looked with hungry eyes at the weasel. "Who was she?" she asked.

"Friend of a friend. He knew her too." The weasel finally relented, and the stag released him. "Lonely. Smart. Available. Took her. She wanted me."

"What about the bear?" the stag wondered aloud.

"Still saw him. And he didn't push. He didn't make me... we still slept together sometimes, unless I was sleeping with her. And then..."

In the long silence, the tall hart sat back upon his rock and nodded. "You finally had sex with him."

"Yes."

"Did you like it?"

"Yes."

"Did you sleep with him after?"

"Yes."

"And what happened the next day?" the bear asked, his voice carefully prompting a response.

The weasel looked up, tears in his eyes. "I proposed to the female. And she accepted."

"She was your mate," the ocelot said with a certain finality.

"No. She wasn't my mate. She was who I married."

"And the bear?" asked the bear.

"I couldn't stop." The weasel wept pitifully, but his voice was quiet. "She had to have suspected, even known. From the first day, she had our marriage certificate framed and hung over our bed. But for the first five years of our marriage, I would still..." He looked up at the bear who sat with them at the campfire. "You gonna kill me now?"

The great ursine head shook from side to side. "Your tale isn't finished."

Again, a long pause, but the weasel was powerless to stop. "I found ways to fight him. To stay away from him. To hurt him. I was indifferent to him, or said things, or did things that I knew he didn't like. I stopped creating, stopped writing with him, stopped sharing with him. To make him stop wanting me. I had to be normal. I had to find a way to love her, don't you understand? I had to find a way to make it real. I had to stop..."

"He was still your lover, for those first five years of your marriage." The ocelot's voice held contempt, disgust, moral certainty. "You never loved her. You married her to be normal, but you couldn't be normal."

"Your own mask is slipping, feline." The bear eyed her significantly. "Your time will come, but first we need the last of the little weasel's story."

Slowly, the mustelid stood and faced the bear directly, body trembling, muzzle twitching violently, eyes red-rimmed and puffy. "Aim."

"Why?"

"I will not live with the truth for one moment more than I must. Take aim."

The bear raised his arm slowly, pointing directly at the weasel's forehead. "I will show to you a mercy that you did not show to your bear. Speak."

"I spent years in a loveless marriage, without kits, without purpose. My spouse made good money in her scientific specialty, and I used her for it. I got a Masters degree in counseling, writing a thesis paper that he could have torn to shreds for its grammar, for its lame support, for its obvious lack of purpose and direction; the pseudo-college that granted the degree existed for less than ten years. I never worked in the field, not even as a camp counselor. I took classes in game design and pretended to work. I did whatever I had to, not to stray. And the one thing I swore above all else was that I would never, never, never admit the truth: That I loved him and wanted him, and I couldn't let myself be his mate, because he needed me, and she didn't, and that's why I chose her above him. I became less than myself. She made it easy. He would have made me become myself, and I couldn't face that." He breathed in deeply, letting it out quickly. "Damn you for making me tell the truth. And damn me for not facing it."

The gun's report blistered the air again. The weasel took the bullet between the eyes, and the aged, bloodied, bloated, disease-ridden black rat that flew backward onto the sand didn't have enough face left to determine if he were smiling or not.

"And then there were three," the bear whispered into the night.

The ocelot turned terrified eyes to the stag. "Are you just going to sit there and let him kill us? Aren't you male enough to face him?"

"Are you?" The stag stared back at the feline, his eyes hard. "Nothing is what it seems. Those three weren't what they seemed, not until their stories were told, and the truth was heard. So maybe you're male in disguise, and you're too cowardly to face him."

"Your perception sharpens, my dear hart," the bear chided softly. "Closer, at least. An excellent challenge. Perhaps you should tell your tale next, ocelot."

The feline spit harshly, first at the stag, then at the bear. "I am not male!" she screamed, her voice shrill and strident. No other change befell her, and she stayed silent.

"Only the truth," the stag observed. "Very well, you aren't male. If you were, you'd realize that having different genitalia does not automatically shield you from bullets. It can make you stupid enough to think so, especially if there's a female who seems to need protecting. I don't think you're in that category."

"Bravo, good stag!" The bear bowed in the cervine's direction. "You're on the right track, to say the least. And as all of us can tell, you spoke the truth. Have you any more to tell?"

"Not of my story. It's not my turn yet."

"Whose turn is it?"

"Yours." He looked directly at the bear, not flinching. "You owe us some more of your story, although I think I can guess some of your story now. You're a writer, or you wanted to be."

Carefully, the bear nodded. "I wanted even more than that. I wanted to teach. I wanted to show students in all academic fields just how important words can be, how vital. Words literally create the world. That's why truth is so fragile, so easily manipulated... at least, in most cases. It's been proven, in science, in psychology, in sociology, philosophy, journalism. We keep our world defined by our words, and whatever words we choose, that's what our worlds are made up of. To name something is to make it real." He waved an expressive arm at the bodies around the campfire. "How do you think they survived as long as they did? They retold the lies until they were able to live their way through them."

"And the ones who were affected by their lies, the ones who were damaged by the lack of truth..." The stag nodded. "Did you know someone who killed himself because of his academic failure?"

"Quite a few, actually, although only two literally stopped their biological lives. The rest simply let themselves be so much less of themselves that they might as well have been dead."

"Like him?" He jutted a chin toward the weasel-rat. "He hardly looks old enough to have given up so much of his life."

"Is any of us what we seem?" The bear offered a half-smile. "He looked as he did when he gave up his life, at least he did at first. That naïve young weasel, that comparative innocent... that's the mask he wore for so very long. Now he looks... somewhat more at peace, wouldn't you say?"

"Stop toying with us!" the ocelot spat, bolting to her hindpaws. "Just get on with it!"

"Then it must be you who wants to go next."

"Why not him?"

"Maybe I like him. Or maybe because I want at least one other to hear your litany of lies."

"I don't--" Whatever she was about to say next was choked off at the cat's throat. She gagged and coughed, as if trying to spit out whatever she was holding back.

"Got your own tongue?" the bear asked mildly.

With a violent sound of retching, a small object flew from her mouth and landed, sizzling and screaming into the fire, burning to a crisp in seconds, its shape unidentifiable, but the sound it made was like a terrified kit, too young for words, but not so young as not to know pain.

"Your first truth, and it died a-birthing." The bear seemed utterly unmoved. "Be careful; you have far too many truths that must be expelled to do so in such a painful a manner."

"What kind of truth was that?" the stag demanded.

"An original truth. An embryonic truth. A truth which she would deny at any cost, to it, to herself, to anyone else."

After a long moment, the cervine turned harshly to the cat. "Whose was it?" he demanded. "Whose kit did you murder?"

"Carefully, young hart," the bear cautioned. "You may be leaping too far, in this case. Not every aborted thing might have become a kit or pup. Not every murder that begins deep within was to become one of us. But it does require that someone give up his seed, in one form or another." He waved a paw gently - this time, the one holding the pistol. "Time to begin your accounting, feline."

"I have never--" Again, the ocelot choked harshly and spat something into the fire that writhed and screamed as it crisped and gave up its ghost.

"Have you ever witnessed an exorcism, young stag?" the bear asked as if it were an ordinary question. "You look bruised and beaten enough to have gone through one yourself, in fact or in essence."

"What are you talking about?"

"You must make the demon reveal its name before you can conquer it. Remember what I said? If you can name something, you can make it real; if you can call it by its true name, it must reveal its true nature, and you can control it, or banish it. Haven't you noticed that none here has mentioned his or her own name? Not you, not I, certainly not this one. Even disoriented as you are, you knew enough not to tell your name, and I strongly suggest that you not do so now."

The bear turned his dark eyes on the ocelot. "You, however... you will answer me. Truth compels you. Who are you, feline? How many names have you had? How many lives have you destroyed? How many of us have you stolen from, taken our life essence, whether the seed of our bodies or the seeds of our minds, our spirits, our lives? Who are you? Name yourself."

"I am legion," the feline hissed, forepaws extended in a clawing gesture.

Raising his arm, the bear shot directly through the ocelot's right forepaw. The stag watched in horror as the cat laughed and licked at the blood, appearing black in the flickering light of the campfire.

"Name yourself."

"I am beyond counting," she spat. "I began before you; I will live on after you. I am the source of all life, and you cannot--"

"LIAR." The bear stood for the first time, still facing the feline. "You cannot keep up your lies in this place. You are no more female than you are male. You bear a female's form and face - in my experience, you do so more often than not - but you are not the essence of what bears life. You are what destroys the best of life. Name yourself."

"I am what you have always feared, you pathetic excuse for a male, you bag of sick blood, weary bone, and excrement..." The ocelot's face twisted, contorted, shifting, as the stag stared dumbstruck, rooted to the ground as if held by powerful paws grabbing his hooves, holding him fast. "I am what you could not face. I am what you denied because you could not accept what is normal. You are what brought you to your own end..."

"No. You are what tried to bring me to my end. Shall I name you? Shall I tell you what names you tried on me? You are Celia, who tried to marry me into submission."

The feline thing screamed into the blackening skies.

"You are Elizabeth, who lied to me, claiming to be barren, twisting my heart and my body to your own purpose, taking my seed, trying to own me through conception that you could not accomplish."

Retching, choking, as unborn things flew from the screaming maw of the cat-thing to be consumed by the growing fire, burning higher and hotter even as the night edged closer to the circle.

"You are Colleen, thief, usurper, render of prose to suit the masses and steal the seed of my deepest creations."

"DAMN YOU!"

"After you, harlot! Precede me, whore! Enter the fire first, hell-bitch! NAME YOURSELF!"

The scream was nothing that could have come from the maw of any being the stag could have named or recognized. He threw up his arms as if trying to fend off the horror of the sound, the agony of many voices bound into one. His eyes, unable to close themselves against the vision, bore witness to a myriad faces, separate and merging, fur, flesh, teeth, bone, claw, muscle, sinew, the black oil that was the blood of nothing living, flowing, sliding, spurting, erupting, the cry ending sharply, suddenly, as a single word whispered on what was left of the air...

"...doubt..."

The gunshot once more shattered the skies, giving the stag the strength to close his eyes against what he would see. Surely nothing could behold that Gorgonian truth and live...

"It's done."

After several moments of nothingness, the stag dared open his eyes in the direction of the voice. The bear, his fur shot through with gray and white, his face haggard, his eyes rheumy and heavy-lidded, slumped upon his rock in an untidy heap of self, his forepaws hanging down between his legs, the gun still in one paw, barely even noticed.

"What do you mean?" the cervine managed to whisper.

"The stories are told. The truth is evident. It's done."

"What about my story?"

Slowly, the bear raised his head, managing a feeble smile. "This is your story."

"What in Hell are talking about? You've murdered four people--"

"Look again."

Disbelieving, the stag looked around the campfire, seeing nothing but two large rocks, on opposite sides of the low flames. No other rocks, no bodies, nothing living or dead, just unblemished sand.

"Masks, my young stag. Just masks. Like comedic or tragic masks in some strange play, upon some even stranger stage." The bear inhaled deeply and sighed. "That's the problem, you see. Too many masks. It's why no one dares get close anymore. We're not who we seem to be. We want what is real, but we won't risk giving what is real. I wanted my mother, and she denied me herself. I wanted to teach, to create, to become myself, and academia forbade me to be genuine. I wanted to be loved, to share my love openly, and the lover I wanted could not admit that he wanted me back. I even tried to pretend, to give in, and even then, I was denied.

"Nothing here was what it seemed. Everyone wore masks. Even you."

"I haven't told my story."

"You don't have to tell. It's an old mantra of writers: Show, don't tell. Don't tell your story, young hart - live it."

"Is anyone that strong?" he whispered.

"You have it in you. I've seen it. It will be difficult, but you need no mask." The old bear looked up, his face a truth of pain. "Will you promise me to live your story?"

The stag paused long before he steeled himself to look the bear in the eyes. "Yes. I will live."

"Will you tell the truth to all who dare to listen?"

"I will be true."

"Will you remember all that has passed here, and will you remember how to slay the past, to slay the obstructers, to slay perfidious lovers, to slay doubt?"

"I will remember."

"Will you remember how to want someone who wants you back?"

"This, above all, I will remember. I will learn how to want what is true, and have it want me back."

"Then, my good fur... it is done."

The bear raised the gun to the underside of his own muzzle and fired upward and back. The stag stared as the bear was thrown backward from his rock, and the bear landed on the sand behind it. The bear bled into the dry earth, his bear's smile still and unmistakable.

Exhausted, the survivor sat upon the rock and stared deeply into the fire, watching it dwindle and wane as the sky changed slowly, from black to indigo, from solidity to something with faint lines of gently growing color. The twining tendrils of smoke from the fire greeted the first rays of the dawn as it peeked slowly over the edge of the world. The survivor remembered the masks; he remembered the bear; he remembered the truth. He rose, standing before the ashes of the fire, turning his back to it in order to embrace the sun. Arms outstretched, he felt it burn away the last of his mask, the end of his pretense. When he turned, he saw his shadow, knowing that it was part of the dream that he was to make real. The shadow was Truth: The space made in the shape of oneself when the light shines upon it.

Truth becomes you, said the bear's voice in his head, as you become the truth.

The Survivor strode from the cold ash of the campfire, the fire which he now kept aflame within. He left the place of masks to be the truth. He went forth to tell his story.

Perhaps you have heard it...