Help! A Bear Is Eating Me! Read Online Free PDF

Kleins. It had to happen, didn’t it? I’m at peace with it, but I don’t want Marcia to see me this way. I am not looking my sexiest right now. So not sexy. The image of me, steeped in blood and shit and Slim Jim wrappers, trapped and … humiliated, really, by that dumb bear … If Marcia sees me like this she’ll never call me Daddy again.



4
    I wonder if my darling Edna and Marcia from Product Dialogue have warmed to one another in my absence. They sure were frigid on each other in my presence. They didn’t say a word to or about each other from Seattle to yesterday. I had them both in the Rover from Anchorage to Camp Image Team, with Edna attempting to navigate in the shotgun seat and Marcia sitting in the middle of the back seat, where the rear view mirror gave me an excellent view of her independent front suspension absorbing the off-road shocks. Marcia was quiet — one of her many luxury features. Edna was not quiet. She moaned and complained and worried and told me I was doing it wrong, whatever it happened to be.
    “Marv, we are not on the map,” she whined as I piloted my unstoppable Rover over fallen logs and mid-sized canyons. “You’re going to get us stuck in some tree! What was wrong with that trail? It was a fine trail.” I explained to her that a Range Rover creates its own trail automatically, by crushing objects directly beneath it. The in-dash navigation and luxury-management screen displayed an attractive nipple of concentric red rings undulating dead ahead of us, across a field of calm grey-green pixels and occasional suggestions to relax. Who needs trails when you’ve got Global Positioning? We were closing in on the agreed-upon spot, and it was important that I reach it first, both to humiliate Frink, who claims to know this area, and to win a certain bet over who sets up camp versus who sips cold beer on the self-inflating couch.
    So we crushed our winning way through the undergrowth and overgrowth, efficiently trampling the scrawny brush and wetlands that passed for nature, making a bee-line for the prize. But Edna would not shut up about the “danger.” I told her: baby, I had this car danger-sealed. Danger cannot enter, so baby, shut up.
    Marcia from Product Dialogue whined: “Aren’t you worried you might run over a squirrel?” Marcia has a weakness for small furry things. Which is great when those small furry things are sweaters or lingerie, but sometimes her weakness is just weak.
    “Marcia,” I explained, “just by driving a fossil-fuel burning car from the ferry station in Anchorage to here, we must have already killed twenty or thirty squirrels with global warming. Not counting all the bugs on the windshield, or that cat that Frink ran over at the Chevron. I mean, did you go vegan or something?”
    “No,” she said, submissively, the way I like. She pouted a little.
    “Are you going off Atkins and switching to a crueltyfree diet?”
    “No.”
    “Good. Cruelty looks good on you.”
    “Marv!” Edna complained. “What are you … that’s a cliff , Marv! You’re driving straight down a cliff! ”
    “Edna, do you even know what four-wheel drive means? Do you grasp the concept?”
    “It won’t mean poop if the car’s upside-down, Marv!”
    “We have a very low center of gravity, Edna. We’re Velcroed to the land.”
    Looking in the mirror I noticed that quiet, stoic, beautiful Marcia from Product Dialogue appeared a little pale. She has such a delicate constitution, like a bird really, and it occurred to me that while Edna would be the one to complain and critique, Marcia would be more the type to spill her Alaskan motel breakfast all over my Oxford leather upholstery. So I stopped the car.
    “Why are we stopped? What are you doing?” annoyed Edna.
    “Rest stop. Map check. Piss break.”
    “On the face of a cliff ? If I open this door I’ll break my ankle and die !”
    “It’s not a cliff, baby. It’s a ravine.” I clambered out the drivers’ side,