BRIAN

He was afraid of this. When he turns on the television, the screen lightens to reveal a reporter standing in the woods. His handheld microphone reads Z-21 across its handle. On these local stations you’ll always find a different guy wearing the same bad tie and ill-fitting JC Penney suit, all of them either fresh out of college and hungry to prove themselves or else old and tired with yellow teeth and black dye jobs, their hunched posture indicating their grim acceptance of never making it out of minor-league news. This reporter is no exception, no older than Brian and stuttering his way through a report of a Bigfoot sighting. When he gestures to the pine forest behind him and says, “It was near here, in these very woods, that the alleged creature was allegedly spotted,” his tone is alternately fearful and joking, as if he doesn’t know quite how to pitch the story.

The live shot cuts to an earlier interview. The reporter stabs the microphone at a man with a silvery beard stained orange around the mouth from tobacco. He wears a camo hat and flannel shirt with a gray hood sewn into it. “Can you tell us what you saw?” the reporter asks off-camera.

“Well.” The man—Jim Ott, Witness, the white tape at the bottom of the screen reads in black lettering—takes off his hat and scratches his head before saying, “I don’t want to say it was or it wasn’t. Him, you know. Sasquatch. I don’t know. This is all very strange. But this thing, let me tell you about it, was bipedal.” Here he squares his shoulders, proud of the word. “And for those out there who are saying, oh, it’s a bear—nothing but a bear—let me ask, you ever seen a bear do this?” He departs the screen now and the cameraman takes a moment to find him again, out there in the road, mimicking the movements of Brian, lurching along with one arm before his face, like some hillbilly Nosferatu.

Then he comes back to the reporter, laughing and shaking his head. “Swear to God. Cross my heart. Honest to goodness. All that. I mean it. That’s what I saw. I tell you what, though. They always say Bigfoot is tall, but this one was short.” He puzzles over this a moment. “Maybe it was a infant.”

The report continues but Brian doesn’t hear any more of it, doesn’t even seem to breathe until the newsbreak ends and a National Guard commercial takes over. A man with a grease-painted face leaps from a plane and into the night sky, lost to the darkness as Brian punches off the television.

By the time he dresses and chews his way through two bowls of cereal and drives to O.B. Riley, the road is lined with trucks and the woods are busy with men toting rifles, oiled and ready to fire. There are dogs—pointers and labs—everywhere, some of them leashed to bumpers, others darting freely through the trees and the slow-moving traffic. He rolls down his window and the cool breeze carries the noise of dogs baying, rifles firing, and men speaking in low voices. He overhears one man saying a Bigfoot head would look real nice on his office wall, among the lacquered trout and trophy bucks. Another asks if it would be a kind of cannibalism, eating Bigfoot.

They are and they are not talking about him. He cannot help but imagine them as his enemies. Running a knife along his neck to make a blood necklace. Pulling the guts from his belly and hosing down his insides. Peeling the meat from his bones and rubbing garlic salt and cayenne pepper into his rump before grilling it over hot coals. When a man in a Carhartt jacket looks at him, Brian glances away in a hurry, very nearly expecting him to yell out, “There! He’s the one we want!” And then they would swarm toward him and beat at his windows with their fists, the butts of their rifles, shaking the truck and finally turning it over and dragging him from the cab to cook on a bonfire spit while they danced around and stomped their feet.

His guts roil and his breath quickens with a panicky feeling that convinces him he will die if he doesn’t quit this place. It is then, when rounding a bend in the road, when fluttering his boot above the accelerator, that he spots her house. He hates to see it this way, through the invading traffic, with so many men tromping about as if in competition with him. But such thoughts are short-lived as he notices the garage door descending and the white Ford Focus pulling out of the driveway.

Two cars are between them, so he feels anonymous in trailing her, through this hilly section of forest and into town, where she pulls into the Safeway parking lot. He maintains his distance, heading to the other side of the lot, waiting to kill the ignition until she pops out of her car and disappears into the store.