Kevin Moffett, Bears Among the Living

Kevin Moffett’s sublime short story, “Bears Among the Living,” packs the power of a novel in a few pages. It’s an entire meal in small delicious bites. By stringing together seemingly random experiences, the protagonist walks us through his father’s death, how he deals with a mother who likes to tipple a bit, all the way to his own faltering fatherhood. Along the way he loses his innocence, but never abandons his off-the-wall take on life.

Highly autobiographical, as the author admits at the end, it’s like Moffett’s sitting next to us on the couch, sharing whatever comes to mind, seemingly without rhyme or reason, like cartoon thought bubbles. In return, we inject our own memories into the story, as if we’re part of a conversation of one upmanship. When he talks about the omniscient ice cream man, we remember how we loved those strawberry bars with coconut topping. Birthday parties at Top-Dogs? We’re there, adding our own toppings. We can taste the orange Tang his mother feeds him as a baby. It was good enough for the astronauts, after all. Although the story hops around from vignette to vignette, we never get lost. The tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, the author’s sly take on life, holds everything together.

By the end these quirky, even awkward moments present a whole that is poignant, topical to its time, complete. We know this person. We feel his struggles. We cheer for him. He isn’t perfect and we like that. Moffett bring us to see ourselves as, “bears among the living, agile and fearsome. We range and rut. We hunt. We return to our dens to sleep and let torpid winters seal our wounds.” In other words, we survive, despite all.  

In contributor notes published by BASS 2022, Moffett wrote, “More and more, as both a writer and a reader, I’m drawn to short, self-contained pieces, ones that arrive late to the party and leave before they say anything too stupid.”

In “Bears Among the Living,” it’s like he’s constantly trying, without success, to stop himself from saying something stupid. That’s the funny. That’s the magic.

“Bears Among the Living” was first published in McSweeney’s, Issue 63, and selected for Best American Short Stories 2022.