Toy Story

by Brian Benson

It was just a teddy bear, but it was soft, and mine, so when Drew wanted to hold it I wasn’t sure I wanted to give it to him. He was a big boy, though, and I was in his house, and his house had a pool and he knew how to swim in it and also how to skateboard down his steep driveway, and though I knew he was only being nice to me because his mom said he had to I didn’t want him to stop. So I gave him my teddy, or maybe he took it, I don’t remember, all I remember is running around that house, which had so many rooms, so many places for Drew to hide, or maybe he wasn’t hiding, maybe he was just a lot faster than me and a lot better acquainted with this house in which I was only a visitor. When I finally found him, he was in the den, laughing, holding my teddy; I was so relieved that it took me a second to see that my teddy’s eyes were gone. I didn’t want to cry, but I had to, and I didn’t want the moms to hear, but they did, and even after Drew’s mom sent him to his room and my mom sewed the eyes back onto my teddy, I kept crying, because my teddy couldn’t see me, he’d never seen me, his eyes weren’t even eyes, just little pieces of plastic. Anyway, that’s how I got into the Ninja Turtles.

6S

Brian Benson is the author of Going Somewhere and co-author, with Richard Brown, of This Is Not For You. Originally from the hinterlands of Wisconsin, Brian now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches creative nonfiction at the Attic Institute. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y, Tahoma Literary Review, Pithead Chapel, Sweet, and Cleaver, among several other journals.