Brown Bear

I had taken up a job working at Fern Marker Hospital in Sonoma, Kansas around the August of 2004, quitting shortly after.

During my time there, my psychological stability was put on the fritz everyday. Working in a hospital is one of the most mentally demanding jobs out there, and some of the scariest things I saw were crushed limbs, hanging organs, bashed heads of careless drivers. But my resignation wasn’t because of these things, these were expected, the things to follow weren’t.

Specifically, I recall the night of August the 6th. I remember being the first one there, seeing a small family rush in through the E.R. gate, all of them covered in a thick coating of blood. They looked just like regular folks. The adults carried with them what I presume were their children.

The father quickly approached me, appearing injured, yelling,

“Where did it come from! I- I don’t know where it came from!” Panicking, he terrifyingly wiped the maroon liquid from his face. I just stood there, in utter shock. What the hell had happened?

After backing away from the situation, (as I was extremely inexperienced), I observed from a distance that their boy was having a seizure. I’m not too sure of the final diagnosis because I quit too soon after the incident to receive a followup. But the daughter, and the mother, as I recall, they were both in good condition; just severely shaken up.

It is by now that a few doctors were summoned to the premises. They had calmly arrived with a small staff of other personnel, attempting to subdue the disturbed man. Despite their efforts, he ran psychotically down B wing and tossed over a stretcher in the heat of it. The mother and the daughter were very clearly emotionally disturbed seeing this.

Before I could ask any questions, or help in any way, they whisked the boy, daughter, and mother off to another part of the hospital.

I was never able to keep tabs on the patients since I was just a beginner at the time, and many thought of me as untrustworthy… Perhaps they were right?

Anyways, a few hours had passed and the clock was just reaching 12:30-ish in the morning. I found comfort that my shift was nearly over, so I began the tedious process of packing my things. The day had just been so weird, it left something on me.. Like an energy or something, I just couldn’t rid myself of it.

That night at home I was horrendously paranoid. Every hallway was yet another pit of scared thinking, strained breathing, and confused thinking. Even my dreams, my dreams were the worst of it. Here’s what I wrote in my journal:

“''Had some really odd dreams last night, pretty disturbing in fact. In the first one I was surrounded by faces, like as if they were modeled in clay, no expressions on them whatsoever. It was as though they were suffering, suffering horribly. The second one was more or less a continuation of the first, I saw bears. It was like a messed up kids cartoon, and all the happy bears were now sad and demented. They screamed as they burnt in flames, and there was a music, I can’t even begin to talk about it, it was monotonous and wrong.”''

When I had awoken that morning, as cliché as it may sound, I swore I saw something standing at the edge of my bed.

When I returned to work the next day, beginning the process of cleansing my mind of the impurities of the night before, I was met with a deadly confrontation of my fears. Passing by the B wing to my office, my eyes gazed over into the room of child from the day before, the one who was having a seizure. Laying on the white bedside stand were the images of the bear I saw on the dream.

In horrible, almost otherworldly handwriting read, "Brown Bear" all around the edges of the page, with the grotesque picture in the center.

It was like that story from when you were a child, repeating that classic little line over and over again in your head:

“Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see?”

I could tell that his drawings somewhat resembled him, Brown Bear, I could see his shining amber coat, and a few features of his face. But the overall picture was… morbid. It was wrong, wrong in a way that I can’t explain.

And so I resigned.

And ever since I’ve been plagued by these memories, I just felt as though I needed to get them out.

I hope none of you have to go through this.