Original Stories Fan Fiction ❯ The Velveteen Teddy Bear ❯ The Velveteen Teddy Bear ( Chapter 1 )

The Velveteen Teddy Bear

 

By

 

Murasaki-Hime

There once was a teddy bear. Out of all the teddy bears, this bear was a princess. It was white as newly fallen snow and soft as the breath of angels. It had a ribbon around its neck, the color of a rose. On its soft white snout lay a small nose, darker than a moonless midnight. To keep this nose company, for a moonless midnight surely seems lonely, two deep, soulful brown eyes shone.

 

This bear belonged to a young girl, who thought herself to be its exact opposite. Though she too had brown eyes they were the brown of mud, and most unappealing. Her hair was beautiful though, soft and shiny and an envied shade of blondish-brown - it was a pity she had allowed her friend to cut it, for her friend knew nothing of cutting hair. To these eyes and this hair was given the face of her father. Her cheekbones were high, but her face was rather large and her nose rather, too. And though she had been told often that she had eyelashes people would pay for, she found the comments odd, she did not think her eyelashes were any different from anyone else's; and why would someone pay for eyelashes?

 

Still, despite her appearance, she tried to make the bear feel welcome. She loved it greatly and thought she would keep it forever.

 

So the little girl grew and she kept her bear. Until one day when she was no older than seven, her parents decided to move. This was new to the little girl, for though the house was not the one she was born in it was the only one she knew. Yet she was only seven and her parents were busy, so she was not noticed. The thing about the child was that she did, and despite her young age found out many things about the people who would be living in her house. And she had a way of finding things out that was in no way nosey but in every way thorough, so when her parents designed the new home they would live in she had picked her room out before it was even built.

 

The old house was sold and because the new one was not built yet, they rented one. Everything was brought with them from the old house and the little girl made sure she had her teddy bear with her the entire time. So the little girl took her bear upstairs - they were the first she had seen in a house - and picked out a room. They lived there for a while, all through Christmas. But her happiness was not destined to continue.

 

One day, a rather bright day despite the usual weather, the little girl went about finding out what she wasn't told. Youth held nothing over her eyes and she knew her parents were hiding something; she was going to find out what. Leaving the bear in her room - royalty should not be lowered to snooping - she sat down in the hall beside her parents partially opened door and peeked inside. She noticed a small air mattress that was being used in replacement for the larger one, but what struck her more was the sight of her daddy. Her dad was a large man who grew up out doors and didn't go for being lazy, yet at that moment she thought he looked downtrodden.

 

She half noticed her mother was upset, but was too unsettled by the sight of her daddy to find out why. She returned to her room and lay down on her bed, completely forgetting her teddy bear.

 

The next few days were a blur. Her dad disappeared and her mom all but, and yet the rest of her family seemed to swarm. She saw more of her relatives then than in any other time in her life. Even her aunt from out of the country flew to the U.S.!

 

It was some time later that she was brought to the hospital by her mother - she left her bear at home because hospitals are full of sick people and it might get sick too - and on the way her mom explained. She said that her daddy had started coughing up blood, and that they had to take him to the emergency room. She said that the E.R. doctor did some tests and they found out that her daddy had cancer.

 

She was brought into her dad's hospital room and her dad told her how much he loved her and that when he got better he would treat her a lot nicer and take her to nice places, and her mom cried and her dad cried and she cried, too. After that she was brought back home and her mom stayed at the hospital to watch over her dad. She found out in her non-nosey but thorough way that her dad had an 80% chance of survival and thought these were pretty good numbers so she didn't worry to much.

 

A few days later she was rushed to the hospital and in that special way of hers, found out that her dad had begun to bleed internally some days before and was taken to ICU and put into a coma. They had begun trying to ease him out of it when something happened and his chances of survival dropped from 80% to five.

 

It was then that she was taken in to see her dad for the first time since he had been taken to ICU. She was taken in to say goodbye. The pastor came in and they turned off the machines.

 

 

They had a funeral and buried him under a bench because headstones were banned from the cemetery. They then went to the church for a wake and her aunt tried to read a poem she wrote about him, but broke down crying and had her husband finish it instead. They also showed a movie with lots of pictures of him when he was growing up. Everyone who knew him showed up and they all had something great to say about him.

 

When the service ended another little girl, a second cousin or something, she didn't know, came up and gave the little girl a bear. She took it and smiled at the girl and they walked away. When she looked at the bear she found it to be larger than the one she had at home. It was nowhere near as soft and its eyes looked like mud, just like hers. Its fur made her feel a little itchy where it touched, too. Its nose was bits of thick string sewn next to each other, nothing else, and its body was odd; the head was large and more stuffed than the rest of the body and the body itself was more stuffed near the bottom, making it look like its neck extended to it's stomach. Its ears had no stuffing at all and wobbled. Even its bow was made of plaid ribbon, which was coming undone at the ends; she hated plaid. Attached to the bear's bow was a note that said, in flowing, poem-ey words, that this bear was someone lost, who had gone to heaven, and every time you hugged it, you were hugging that person in heaven.

 

Despite its drawbacks - especially the itchiness - the little girl found it more approachable than her bear at home and found herself hugging it for all she was worth.

 

It smelled of onions.

 

 

As the girl grew up she found that she forgot about the bear with fur as white as snow and soft as breath, but she always had the bear that smelled of onions. So when the girl grew older and made her dreams goals and her goals reality, the bear was always there. And when she found herself missing her daddy she would take the bear and crawl into bed and hug it tight and think about her daddy. Yet even though that bear was ugly and falling apart and would be a bad memory, the little girl kept loving it, and instead of dwelling on its bad memories, she filled it with good memories of her daddy, and all the love she had for him.