Tunes for Bears to Dance To

Content Warning: The text deals with themes of antisemitism and includes numerous racial slurs.

The first epigraph, by French author Gustave Flaubert, compares human language to a “cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to” (Epigraph), though humanity’s real longing is to create pity in an unmoving universe. The second quotes the Lord’s Prayer: “Deliver us from evil” (Epigraph).

An elderly man emerges from a psychiatric hospital as he does every morning, carrying a bag. He is watched by 11-year-old Henry Cassavant, who lives in a tenement next door and whose cast prevents him from following the man. Henry broke his kneecap tripping over the steps of his school bus at the end of the school year. When his mother points out that the proper name for the next-door building is an “institution for the insane” (2), Henry reflects that the man doesn’t look “crazy” or “insane.”

Henry is awkward with his crutches and compares himself to his athletic older brother, Eddie, who has been dead for nearly a year. His parents are engulfed in grief over Eddie’s death, which frustrates Henry. He wants his cast removed so he can go back to his afternoon job helping