jay chesters

I came home and found a bear in my living room.

Attending weddings live-streamed over Zoom was normal. A ring bearer, when the bearer was literally a bear, was not.

I sat in my underwear, watching the wedding as it played over the internet and onto my laptop in real-time. The camera off, Zoom window pinned in the corner of the screen, I was distractedly switching tabs.

While I was searching for sourdough advice, foraging deals on pre-worn iconic Levi jeans, and scouring Pinterest for web design inspiration, the wedding continued in its corner. Maybe I could design something featuring bears?

There was strange normalcy to virtual ceremonies in 2020. It soon became usual for weekends to have a Zoom wedding, a child's baptism on Microsoft Teams, a funeral broadcast live on Instagram. Virtual events meant avoiding crowds and almost limitless guests.

The groom was wearing flannel and had trimmed their iso beard for the occasion. Was the wedding's theme "ironic hillbilly" or "retro lumberjack"? I couldn't tell from the guests, so minimised Pinterest's inspirational mood boards to better concentrate on the fuzzy event video. I couldn't miss something in the nuptials only to be asked about it in the reception's YouTube channel.

A member of the wedding party read poetry to their online guests, their earnest words slightly muffled. The ring bearing bear was bearing up surprisingly well.

It was the year of the bear. The bears had very quickly become the new normal, just like everything else absurd this year.

After the bushfires came several once-in-a-decade storms, after the storms the global pandemic, and after the pandemic the bears. The bears went from dozens to suddenly clogging the streets.

They numbered in their thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. There seemed to be more every time you looked. Impossible to distinguish one from another, their bodies pressed together and moved with a single purpose and a single mind.

Nobody had ever seen so many bears. Nobody had guessed that so many bears even still survived in the country. Yet they were undeniable, a growing, teaming mass of bear – black bears, grizzly bears, brown bears, and everything in between – lumbering along, oblivious to everything else.

Occasionally a fight would break out and two enormous beasts would rise up on their back legs with a deafening roar. Even people who had begun to break quarantine to creep outside their homes to watch would take a step back, afraid that some spell would be broken and the bears would notice them, turn on them. But they never did.

The fights rarely came to any actual violence, there might be a swipe of a giant paw or an enormous set of teeth would graze an opponent, but it would be forgotten almost as soon as it began.

We couldn’t tell if they were running from something or towards it. The truth is, they didn’t seem to be in any great hurry to be anywhere, but their numbers grew every day, with every town they passed through, always more bears.

It was almost an unspoken agreement that we wouldn’t touch them, interfere with them, hurt them. We didn’t know when it started, but it showed no signs of stopping.

The no touching the bears rule was so obvious it was almost as quickly ignored. Bears started appearing outside car dealership sale events, or with a TV weather forecaster under hot studio lights. Today was my first time seeing a bear in a wedding.

I stopped daydreaming and started paying attention to the wedding, however virtual. The couple's vows were taking on new significance, in sickness and in health and til death do us part now felt conspicuous under a global pandemic's cloud.

Then came exchanging rings. The ring bearer, whose luscious coat had been so lovingly brushed for the occasion, stepped forward almost on command.

What came next will be analysed for decades.

Some say there was a bee in the bride’s bouquet, others that the bear panicked when the ribbon holding the couple's rings was cut.

The celebrant was unceremoniously torn asunder. Fleeing, the social media savant and their oversized laptop were no match for a grisly 200kg predator.

The no touching the bears rule became better observed, and their march continued.