IN OUR IMAGINATIONS (A Lovecraftian Barney Fanfic)

Sept 30, 1993

Kara had never liked the stuffed bear. She couldn't place exactly why. It was kept in the simple wooden toy chest, along with the other donated toys: plastic trains, off brand transformers and half dressed barbies. But there was something odd about this toy. Kara couldn't quite place what. To look at it, it was just an ordinary if garishly colored stuffed animal.

It was a bright green stuffed bear, large perhaps for a very young child but the children in Kara's class were a bit older, leaving it about the size of a child's abdomen. It's lime-green fur was very short and the stuffing inside was thick enough that it easily sat up all by itself. It had no tags, no brand insignia, nothing to indicate who had made it or where it had come from.

And yet...

There was almost something in its vacant stare, it's lifeless black eyes that seemed to know more than they let on. 

It was stupid, she tried to remind herself. It was just a doll. But her disquiet remained.

That didn't seem to stop the kids from liking it though. Kara had only been working at the school for a year, but she had seen a faithful following of kids play with the bear every year. Most toys seem to wax and wane in their popularity but the bear was one of the perennial favorites.

She'd asked Helen, the teacher who had worked at the school longest how old the toy was. it had happened to be during a break while the children were out at recess. She'd found Helen watching NHL on a miniature TV desk.

"Do you know anything about that bear," Kara asked Helen, one of the other teachers, one day during recces.

Helen was a bit of a veteran, having worked at the school for almost fifteen years. Her blonde hair had almost surrendered to the encroaching grey. Her joyless eyes were complemented by deep bags that seemed almost ready to engulf the rest of her face.

"I don't know," Helen replied testily, her eyes glued to a miniature TV on her desk, the almost microscopic images of hockey players skating around a rink just barely visible on the screen. "It's just a teddy bear. I don't really pay much attention to what toys we have here."

She banged on her hand angrily on the top of the television.

"Come on, Gretzky! You call that a hit? Get your head in the game."

The small television set was color, if only barely. All it could really claim to accomplish was a fairly monochromatic look with slight orange hue covering everything, as if the screen had had orange creaminess poured over everything. She could vaguely make out the pallid colored forms of the players on the screen.

"So you don't know where it might have come from?" Kara continued.

"We get new ones every couple of years," Helen said, turning back to Kara. "I don't exactly bother to follow any of them. People donate them to local charities, the charities donate them to the district. The district gives them to us. Your next-door neighbor could have donated something and you'd have no idea who sent it. We just got a new shipment of donated toys last week that still need to be washed and sanitized, if you're so interested."

Kara said nothing. Technically, she and Helen had the same level of authority so she couldn't actually tell Kara what to do, but she opted to drop the subject regardless. Helen was a prickly woman at the best of times and being on her bad side made working at the small school even worse than normal.

The bell rang, announcing the end of the morning recess.

"Cripes," Helen groaned, shutting off the TV. "Never enough to actually do anything. Once you've finally gotten settled into something, the children return."