by Teresa Milbrodt
Who I’m pretty sure lives in the thicket behind my apartment, because if you were Bigfoot it’s where you’d go to avoid the photographers and biographers and economic crisis since everyone is trying to make a buck and you could end up on the cover of the National Enquirer (again) and a dissecting table in the same week. When you’re Bigfoot you can’t have any real friends, you don’t know who might turn you in to the FBI or CIA or NRA and use you for target practice, you’re huge and vulnerable, you might as well stop hiding in forests where everyone expects you to leave footprints and get a job that’s good and solitary like driving a truck across the Arctic Circle so you can wear a parka and snowpants and just your eyes will show through the ski mask. No one will care because at the depot they’ll load your rig with corn chips and tires and send you off across the ice field, and in the cab you can put on the radio and croon to some old country song because they’re sappy and about loss and when you’re Bigfoot you have a lot to lose. During your vacations you can put on jeans and an extra large flannel shirt and a cowboy hat and go to Nashville to the Grand Olde Opry where half the singers are as hairy as you, and you can sit in the back row and weep because that’s how it is, man, you lose your dog and your woman and your truck and it’s enough to make you hole up in some cabin and invent theories on why people won’t leave you alone. It’s a big conspiracy, and who cares if you exist because you know you do and that’s all that matters, but I know Bigfoot exists and he’s in my backyard and I’m not telling anyone, just leaving a package of pre-cooked hot dogs and some buns and potato chips and cream-filled sandwich cookies on the fire escape, and if they’re gone in the morning it could be the neighbor kids, but really it’s Bigfoot living in my thicket, listening to Johnny Cash on the radio and waiting for good times to come around again.