Free The Cage by Audrey Shulman

of the wallpaper as she walked slowly up to her room.
    In the sun the colors of the snow and the bears and the sky reminded Beryl of when she used to get bad fevers as a child. Her temperature would frequently go up to a hundred and five or six. She would pant, her upper lip sticky with the sweat of her effort, her mouth open for her thick tongue. Her parents would take her to the hospital, stand about her bed and hold her hand. They stared in fascination at her pale face with its bright red spot of color on each cheek. She knew each time it happened that they thought once again how unwise they’d been to have a child this late in their lives. They didn’t have the strength to deal with these unexpected events.
    After a few times watching their worry, when she got a fever she would take the thermometer out of her mouth whenever they looked away. When they began to look back, she would slip it quickly back in, keeping her tongue away from it, holding it tight between her cool teeth. Each time they asked her, she’d smile and say she was feeling better, she would get up soon.
    Once when she was seven the fever had been worse than ever, but by then she’d gotten better at pretending. Her parents had still looked worried but hadn’t taken her to the hospital. When Beryl moved her head on the pillowcase therasp of its material had filled her head. Each thread had crackled and snapped in her ear so harshly she wanted to scream. The slow drip of mucus down her throat kept her awake with its insidious slide. The room glittered. The illness was bad. It was very bad and it got worse during the night. The room seemed to be lit even though it was dark. The air seemed bright and warm and stuffy.
    She could see her Raggedy Anne doll perfectly on the chair by the far wall. They looked at each other, eyes open and shining with fever. Beryl’s skin stretched tight with heat and fatigue. She wanted to close her eyes. Her head slowly rolled over to the side, her eyes still open, and she could feel a hum beginning in her body, a vibration as subtle as that of light. It was then that she saw from the corner of her eye the fingernail on her left pinky. A single white cloud floated halfway up its clear pink length. The cloud was as light and fluffy as an early Sunday morning and just above it was the clear half-moon of the nail’s growing edge, smooth and thin as milky ice. The precision of its curve startled her. She wanted to skate along its cool surface, its smooth moon edge. She wanted to exhale white clouds into its chill night air. She wanted to hear the sharp metal of skates on ice, feel the slight tremor in her ankles, float forward fast and cool. Looking at the cloud on her nail she knew what the world would be like if the sky were pink and sunsets blue. Looking at her nail and its one white cloud, she forgot her tiredness for a while and wasn’t even sure when the vibration receded.
    The third day at the dump they saw a young bear catch on fire. A mattress burned about twenty feet from the van. Beryl knew polar bears had no instinctive fear of fire for there were no fires out on the wet tundra or on the ice. Bears had been known to step right onto a campfire and stand still for a moment before confusion registered on their faces. The young bear lay quite close to the flaming mattress, black tongue neatly licking the mayonnaise out of an open jar that had been lobbed to her from a car. The bears craved fat, and mayonnaise contained lots of it, but the jars baffled creatures who were used to flesh. Their paws couldn’t grip the glass, their tongues couldn’t quite reach the bottom. They played with the jars, fascinated, frustrated, for hours.
    The bear discovered she could control the slippery jar if she used all four paws. As she tried to get to the bottom she rolled slowly backward onto her shoulders, and onto the burning mattress. After a slow moment, Beryl thought nothing would happen, that it