A woman walked her duck on a leash from her van to the beach. Moments earlier, she’d clipped the leash to a red vest zipped over the duck’s chest. It waddled politely, foot over foot; it regarded the horizon, the blown-apart clouds, the waves of algae washed up on shore. Then it sat, feet tucked under feathers, a neat package on the sand. If a duck could look melancholy, that duck did. The woman stared back at me and touched her ear, where a brown feather dangled, edged in the green of a dollar bill. The duck began murmuring, the sound rising and swelling, a reverie, a plea. I don’t want him getting any big ideas, the woman said. The duck remained motionless except for its throat. His iridescent head caught the light and held it. The woman nodded, like she understood what I wanted to ask, and said, That’s how all this started.

The man in the bear suit proffered a sunflower that smelled like a sugar cookie. He was going door to door, his thick feet soundless on the gravel in the apartment parking lot. Interrupted, the young woman touched the sunflower and it turned into a pewter mop, still tiny but so heavy it crashed to the ground. Like you, she was confused. Like you, she had no inkling the bear had gone off script. With a fluid motion like a brushstroke, the man swept the bear’s head off. The empty head hung like a hood behind his own, its useless nose pointed into the sky. Like you, she examined the man’s mustache, the exact color of the bear’s fur, luxurious brown; she examined his kind eyes, shrunk to crescents in the sun; she examined his own brown hair, stuck to his forehead. He wasn’t the kind of bear to offer explanations, even for what seemed like an obvious mistake. So she looked behind him, then behind herself, where, startled, she found cubs—three clumsy bundles with claws and pitch black noses, each one full of a different and particular foreboding, each one wanting milk.