Storytime: Hairy.

August 2nd, 2017

I’m telling you, he was RIGHT THERE.
Right.
THERE.
Why won’t anyone believe me?!

Yes, okay, my story is a little hard to believe. It was a dark night. It was cloudy out. I was out near the edge of the woods and okay maybe I’d had a few beers but it was JUST a FEW beers and I wasn’t drunk, ignore what Amy says she’s a bullshitter if I ever met one, damnit, won’t you LISTEN?
And look, it’s not like I ever believed in this stuff before. I’m a skeptic. I’ve seen those guys hanging around making funny calls into the trees late at night, searching for scat and spoor and prints and going bananas whenever they find a funny track from a limpy raccoon. And I’ve laughed at them. I mean, who wouldn’t?
I won’t. Not after last night.

I was walking back from Ryan’s and yes it was just two beers damnit, two each, no more, no less. Lite beer. And I was walking down the trail along the edge of the trees, just by that meadow there. And as I walked, I was humming and crooning to myself because I do that to keep myself company when I’m alone. Big and lonely place, the edge of the trees. Bigger and lonelier still after dark.
Then I heard a twig snap. Big deal, right? A squirrel.
And then I hear a bush rustle. So what. A raccoon.
Then I hear a cough. Deer? But it’s too loud, and then I hear a belch and across the road there he was. Big as day and twice as ugly. Scratching and shuffling
I stopped moving. Don’t know why, don’t want to guess. God, it was the freakiest thing. And in the back of my head were all the usual excuses running – it’s a bear standing up, it’s a guy with hair problems, it’s a deer standing at a funny angle, it’s a stroke and my brain’s shutting down – but none of them were holding up.
He was chewing on something. Could hear the lips smack from thirty feet away. The clumsy thud-n-slap of the careless feet. The murmuring gurgles of a body never before captured on film that wasn’t grainier than a sand sandwich.
So I pulled out my phone. I made sure the night-vision was on. I raised it high, turned off the flash, and BEEP BEEP BEEP my text alert goes off because George wants to know where the hell I am.
There’s this call – this weird, grunting, burping noise, I can’t describe it, it’s like nothing I’ve ever heard a person make – and he’s gone. I sprinted after him, but when I got to the road there was nothing but the smell of burning rubber and gas and a little bit of sour-beer piss. He’d gotten in his car and driven away.
And there I was, left alone to wander back home into the woods. The latest sap of a sasquatch with the two-beer story of the time she saw sandlefoot, without so much as a photo to show for it.

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