What Would You Do?

Fiction by Shedrick Hutson

What would you do if a telephone pole walked out in front of your car?

Let’s say it’s after midnight and you are in your first-generation Prius, doing a Prius’ impression of speeding, on your way home from a pornographic movie company’s going-out-of-business sale. It is raining buckets. Water is two inches deep on the highway. In the trunk of your Prius is a 50-disk crate of assorted oddities—Blue Ray, porn DVDs, and an assortment of expired flavored lubricant.

It’s not weird. You got them at a huge discount but only as a set.

You have embarked on a campaign of betterment aimed at increasing your positive interactions with other people. You hope that you might find true enlightenment. Or at least you will never again be fired from your job at a pet store for yelling at the animals. Even if that one snake was in fact hissing at you on purpose.

You have decided to limit your participation in the world’s negative spaces. You have canceled your internet service and avoided social media for over a month to lessen your latent anger at dudes who won’t shut up about how much they bench press. Your cable was turned off because you were done paying for the thousand cooking shows that are definitely the blame for your high body mass index and bad cholesterol.

You see the weird movies in your trunk as your reward for attempting to be more “socially acceptable” and hope to get home in time to watch them all before your wife gets back. Her trip to visit her family out of state has become your time to relax, unwind and think of a good way to tell your her you got fired from your most recent job as an executive lightbulb repairman. That she has extended her time away multiple time has been a blessing to your search for inner peace and growth.

So here you are, practicing your mindful breathing techniques along with the CD that is playing on the buzzy factory speakers in your car. You are getting a little lightheaded with all the complicated breathing, when suddenly a tall, wide piece of reddish-brown wood appears just beyond the curtain of water in front of you. It steps out in between the beams of your weak headlights.

What would you do?

You stomp on the brake . . . on a flooded highway . . . sporting four bald tires . . . in a car that weighs less than the sectional sofa in your living room.

Smart.

A Prius is too light to make anything like a skidding sound, so you silently hydroplane forward not slowing at all. Just as you try to put on your seatbelt your car hits the telephone pole and everything stops, suddenly. Everything but your chapped lips. They continue on and smack into the steering wheel. Hard.

You sit stunned, listening to your one shrieking windshield wiper. You taste blood when you lick your stinging lip. You lean your head on the steering wheel for a moment.

“Nothing good ever comes from an angry thought,” advises the calm, androgynous voice from the speakers. You take a deep, mindful breath, in . . . out.

Now, this is where you back your car up to see what you hit. Right? No?

Oh. You decide to get out. Okay. You have to slam your obese frame against your stubborn driver’s side door. The second time forces it open. Rain pours your comb over down the opposite of your head. Fat rain drops slap your naked scalp.

Your discount headlights show you that the telephone pole you ran into is covered in mangy, rusty brown fur. And is somehow laying on its side on the ground.

“Odd,” you say to the empty highway. “Why would a telephone pole be wearing a coat?”

The pole stirs. It rolls over to flop onto its back. When the telephone pole’s eyes open they are a bright, confused green.

One day after you get a notice saying that you have let your car insurance policy lapse you run over a damn Sasquatch.

The yeti tries to get up. It fails. It rests on its knees, eyes rolling around, unfocused.
What do you do when the thing extends a huge arm towed you, hand open, palm up?
Did you say get into your car and drive away? Of course you do. Headlights are approaching from the opposite side of the concrete divider and you just mowed down a very endangered species. Escape is the obvious choice.

What is not obvious is why you take the monster’s outstretched hand with both of yours. Even less obvious is why you help it gets to its feet and lead it to your car. You do it though.
The Sasquatch leans a few hundred of its pounds on you as it stumbles to your passenger side door favoring its left leg. You fit the eight-foot-tall missing link into your tiny car by folding the passenger seat as far forward as it will go and still Bigfoot’s black toenails immediately carve grooves into your dashboard. The smell is a solid thing on your tongue. You will never get the yeti ass funk out of your cloth seats.
You regret not lifting the yeti with your legs. A sharp twinge has alerted you that you will soon be visited by the ghost of that old injury to your lower back. If only you had never taken that one job as head repo man for Piano Rental Warehouse. No matter. You have a huge stash of generic Percocets if it gets too bad.

The beast moans and whimpers as you drive. The rain, having been sent only and especially to torment you, recedes and then stops minutes into your return home.

A Sasquatch makes a Prius go slower than a slow Prius, so it is nearly 2:00am when you turn the last corner onto your street. It looks like your working-class neighbors would rather sleep than watch you drive past their neat homes with a semiconscious Sasquatch riding shotgun.

There are no fences on your street, only full lush hedges trimmed to the same height marking the border of every other small front yard. The lawns are always cut and as green as any. The cars are in their garages and the garages are closed and clean. Every window on your block is out.

Anyone would feel a profound sense of peace entering a place like this place when this place is their place. But all you feel is a sense of loathing for your nosey street mates. You routinely see them out your windows, peaking into the recycling bins at the curb in front of your house. Advertisements for lawn care professionals seem to magically find their way onto your front door but not theirs. Doggie doodie lines up along the edge of your grass when you are at whatever job you haven’t been fired from yet.

You don’t complain about the loud kids screaming as they wait for the school bus or yipping of their rats that they like to pretend are real dogs. You were raised knowing that taller fences make better neighbors. Too bad everyone isn’t as well-bred as you.

The doorbell cameras of your neighbors see everything, so you wait until your garage door lowers to the concrete before throwing your body against the driver’s side door, twice. Then you heave the Sasquatch to its feet. Bigfoot leans on you for support. His long armpit hair slides across your scalp replacing your missing comb over. You are almost carrying him, sweating in your wet clothes. He leans even more onto you before you reach the side door into your kitchen. Your lower back is definitely going to be a problem. Soon. You wonder if human Percocet will help your new forest friend with his injury.

It growls and knocks over chairs as you help it limp past your kitchen table. In the dining room it pulls a painting down off the wall. The confused yeti swats a lamp off of an end table in the living room. At the bottom of the stairs, it slaps another lamp across the room. On its way up the stairs, it bumps all the photos off the wall with its huge shoulder.

Sweat is burning in both your eyes when you dump the stinking monster into your empty bathtub. It lands awkwardly one leg and one arm over the side.
In the mirror above the sink your lips are split right down in the middle. A crust of blood is forming at the cut. You try to correct your comb over. You fail. The dark circles of worry and sleeplessness under your eyes are as deep as they have ever been. You take some mindful breaths. In. Out. In. Out.

The yeti growls. His eyes open, roll around unfocused, then close again. You feel pity for the helpless, innocent animal, this wonder of creation, that you have valiantly rescued from certain roadkill. You know in your heart that the universe will reward your kindness.

You would rather that reward come in cash. Bigfoots were popular when last you consumed the unrelenting news feed. There were more TV shows looking for them and specials about the mystery of their existence than ever before you tuned out. Even now you are sure a Sasquatch with only one minor dent must still be worth a lot of money to a zoo or a furrier or maybe a pawnshop. Who knowns. The sky’s the limit.

You’re already spending that windfall in your head. A tall enough stack of bills will definitely stop your wife from leaving you as she has threatened to if you should lose another job. A warning she issued when you lost your gig as the assistant to a waste management detective who, as it turned out, really couldn’t find shit.

A large enough reward and she couldn’t carry her ass out the damn door and you will help her pack. Then you can sell the house. Move to Florida and open your one-of-a-kind cat spray tanning salon.

Plus, you need money now that a new car has become mandatory.

The yeti turns over in the tub. It is a Mr. Yeti. You find this out when you turn on the warm water and the thing looses a pungent, dark yellow spray of urine four feet up the one wall with all the missing tiles. The smell burns in your sinuses like before you were fired from your job as a smoke detector detector. Some more tiles are definitely gonna fall off after that stream.

You smile when you look down. It seems that a yeti isn’t any more well-endowed than a 41- year-old man who once worked as a prison librarian. God doesn’t just hate you. You did a good thing.

What the hell is wrong with you!? Did you bump your dumb ass head too many times?! What would possess a man to purposely bring eight feet of monster into his home? Are you insane? Who does that?! What did you think would happen? You have no way to communicate with a Sasquatch and no chance of stopping him, so it basically has free range over your home.

Now look at you, on your knees, cleaning yeti diarrhea off the floor of another closet. You’d think a woodland creature would naturally do its business in wide open spaces, but no, not this yeti. This freak of nature won’t doodoo until you’re busy somewhere else in your house, then it sneaks into any unlocked closet and then it closes the door behind itself when it’s done pouring brown cement. Your clothes all smell like yeti duke.

It has been five days since you saved a wounded animal in distress from a short life as a speed bump. Four days since his gimpy left leg switched to a gimpy right leg, then magically healed the next day and now it is one day until your wife gets home.

Since the yeti has been inside your home you have used every bit of your meager attention span chasing him around trying to undo the chaos that is having a pet that can accidentally slap your face off your face at any moment. He has already eaten everything in your refrigerator, freezer, two pairs of leather boots, the contents of a bird feeder, and most of your late father’s previously stuffed and mounted moose head. He ate the first three extra-strength Percocets you gave him. Then the next ten. Then the monster started turning the family-sized pill bottles up like he was sipping iced tea and never showed any effect except wanting more and an increasingly lazy smile.

Yesterday your next-door neighbor called to ask if you had seen Einstein, his Pomeranian. You said that you had not. What you didn’t tell her was that you did see Einstein’s ID collar. It was on your dining room floor and that was not ketchup that was soaked into it.

Yeti farts have an after-taste. There is fur on your toothbrush. Sasquatch changes the channel without asking every time you try to watch the news on digital channels. The microwave dinged and he stomped it to dust.

He has been through everything in every room looking for things to eat, destroy or defecate on. Add to that the fact that since the abominable snowman’s cousin has been rampaging through your four-bedroom duplex you haven’t had time to clean the accident residue off your dented bumper or watch any of your assorted oddities porn DVDs.

And how is a bigfoot not priceless? There should be a bidding war for him but every time you call someone about selling a Sasquatch you get an angry response, or a phone hung up on you.

“Yes. I am serious.” you say into the phone.

“Don’t contact me again.” or “Next time I’m calling the cops.” they say.

And if all that is not enough to prove how monumentally stupid you are, your busted lips are so irritated by that expired flavored lube, that you just could not resist tasting, it now looks like you got some bad, back-alley lip injections. Your mouth is not just comically puffy they are also an itchy bright red to boot.

Bringing the Sasquatch home is the worst decision you’ve made since you took that job as driving instructor at the Ray Charles School For The Visually Impaired.

So now what? What do you do now?

You have finally decided that you have had enough. You have? Okay. Sasquatch has to go. Right now! It is just after two in the afternoon. You have about an hour and a half before your neighbors start to arrive home from work and school. If you get him gone now you can avoid having them casually mentioning to your wife that the yeti was there.

It’s go-time.

You find the giant humanoid standing by the sink in your kitchen. His huge hand is wrapped around a fat, light-grey pigeon. The pigeon looks around, calm. Sasquatch carefully strokes down the back of the bird’s head with one finger while doing a spot-on pigeon impression.
The pigeon coos in response. Sasquatch laughs.

It seems you have caught the beast at a good time. A gentle, loving time.

“Hey, man,” you say to your smelly houseguest as if he understands you. “I’m glad to see you’re all better. I suppose you’ll be moving on now.”

Sasquatch stares at you while you are speaking. Then the pigeon coos again. Sasquatch gets distracted. You wait. It seems he has forgotten that you are in the room.

So, you just gonna take that, champ? Oh yeah? Alright. Now you’re looking angry. This monster, standing in your kitchen, ignoring you, is the new limit. Play time is over.

“Hey!” you bark, startling the yeti. “I have been more than fair. Now, what’s going to happen is you are getting out of my house. Do you hear me?”

Sasquatch stares.

“You,” you begin, pointing up at the Bigfoot’s hairy chest with both pointing fingers on both hands, “have to leave,” you continue, pointing both thumbs back over your shoulder towards the back door, “my,” you say pointing both thumbs at your own chest, “house. You conclude, pointing up at the ceiling , then down at your kitchen floor at the last word.
Sasquatch raises the cooing pigeon to his mouth. He takes a slow deliberate bite removing the head and shoulders off the bird in his hand while still watching you. Blood spurts up out of the stump inside the yeti’s fist. The pigeon’s claws clinch and release, open and close, under the yeti’s pinky. Blood and poop fall out of the bird’s bottom half. Bloody bits crackle and pop between Sasquatch’s jaw as he chews slowly, mouth open.

Oh god!

Your stomach does its best Simone Biles impression. You gag hard. Chunks are on the move. You bravely fight back the chunks before they rise up out of your twisting stomach. Somehow you never break eye contact.

You win your battle with a stomach that doesn’t know it is actually empty anyway. You repeat your command to the Bigfoot to leave your house, with the same hand gestures and pointing.

Sasquatch nods at you as it takes another bite out of the pigeon stump. A bloody feather is stuck to his bloody chin fur. He continues to nod in agreement with your command.

It seems that the two of you are finally on the same page. Good. All it took was for you to assert yourself. The animal kingdom has acknowledged your dominance. Congrats.

You turn away to open the door so Sasquatch can take his pigeon lunch to go. Bigfoot grabs your arm before you can take a step. He is still nodding his head. You try to pull away. His grip tightens to a painful squeeze. The pressure of his grip is threatening to break the bone in your upper arm.

When you look down at the hand wrapped around your biceps you see that Sasquatch has dropped his pigeon lunch on your warped linoleum floor. In its place the yeti is now holding a full foot-and-a-half of uncircumcised tree branch.

So, as it turns out, a yeti is actually hung much, much lower than a once assistant shoe technician of a left-handed bowl alley.

You protest with words. You try to pull away from the bloody faced Sasquatch.

Sasquatch pays all of this no mind. His gaze is all for your bright red, cartoonishly puffy lips.
What do you do when you are trapped by an undeniably aroused yeti who has you in his loving crosshairs?

Yes! Yes! You kick him in the hairy hanging fruit. Finally! And you got it on the first try. Good job.

You aim for the furry area where you assume his mythological testicles should reside. The impact makes a satisfying thud. Bigfoot releases your arm. He begins to shake. He drops to his hairy knees, mouth open, eyes wide.

Both his hands are cupping the injured parties. If I had to guess I would say it looks like you got both of them. You stand there watching the injured yeti instead of making your escape.
Let me try that again.

I said, you stand there instead of running for your life and virginity like you really should.
Yes! You!! RUN!!!

Your stomach leads the way through the dining room into the living room. You trip over your own feet, twice. Angry Bigfoot sounds follow you down your front porch steps. At the curb you can hear tossed aside furniture as it finds its way out of the path of the charging beast.
You are gassed two seconds into your sprint down the middle of your deserted street. Big feet are stomping closer behind you. They are landing at a much faster pace than your own, which are rapidly slowing. Your lungs are burning. Your legs feel like they are made of a thick rope. You feel your end is fast approaching.

Just as you near the end of your block, right when you decide to lay down, curl into a ball and pray to any and all gods for help, angels are sent to deliver you from harm.

A police car turns the corner onto your street.

You wave your hands over your head. “Help me!” you gasp, “Help me, please!”

The police car slows, stops. Two uniformed officers step out to stand behind their open car doors. A petite female driver and her tall male partner.

“Help me. He’s after me. He’s trying to kill me,” you wheeze.

Sasquatch’s roar comes from too close behind you.

The cops draw their guns. “Stop!” the young attractive female cop yells from behind her driver side door. “Hands on top of your head.”

You duck and stumble out of their line of fire. You brace for the coming sound of close gunfire.

Three gunshot-less seconds later you turn around to see the Sasquatch standing in the street with his hands, fingers laced, on top of his giant head.

“The fuck?” you mumble.

“What happened sir?” The gorgeous Latina cop asks you. Even scowling at a compliant yeti, she is still strikingly attractive.

“He attacked me…” you stammer in your confusion and exhaustion, pointing at the monster.

Sasquatch begins to raise a hand from his head.

“Do not move,” the passenger side cop yells at him. His unibrow is thick and distracting.

“How did he attack you sir?” Latina Cop asks.

You say, “He was in my house. When I told him to leave he grabbed me. Then he showed me his thing. He was going to rape me.”

“Oh no. Oh hell no” Sasquatch yells, “That statement is preposterous.”

That Bigfoot just say preposterous?

“Look,” the abominable snowman’s first cousin begins. “This man ran me over with his car, he abducted me and has been drugging me and holding me against my will.” Here he falters, his eyes shine with unshed tears. “I only just got free from this predator by the grace of my lord and savior, Jesus Christ,” he ends while making the sign of the cross over his heart.

The officers turn to you. “Is that true, sir?” Unibrow asks.

“Sasquatch talking about Jesus,” you mumble to no one in particular.

“I can prove it,” the yeti says. “He didn’t just assault me with his ugly little car, he left my hair and blood stuck to his bumper like some sick trophy to the deed. It’s still there. This man is a predator. He tried to seduce me.”

The cops look back to you. ” Did you try to seduce the Sasquatch, sir?” Latina Cop asks.

“What?!? No. Of course not,” you yell.

“He put drugs in my food to make me sleepy. God knows what he did while I was deep in a drug induced sleep.” Damn Sasquatch shivers at the thought.

“You took those Percocets on you own,” you yell back.

“What Percocets? “Latina Cop asks.

“They’re mine. I have a prescription.”

The Sasquatch plucks a coin like a poker chip out of his fur. He holds it up. It has the AA logo stamped on it. “I was nineteen-months into my sobriety before he took me. All gone now. All for nothing.”

“You drugged him? Just for sex?” Unibrow asks you.
“
I didn’t drug anyone. I never tried to seduce a damn Bigfoot.”

The bigfoot gaps. His eyes open wide. A large tear falls.

“Hey, Buddy. We don’t use that kind of language. Okay?” Latina Cop tells you.

“Huh?” you ask.

“The B word, sir. You don’t call these people that. Not around me anyway.” Unibrow glances at his partner, “Us I mean.”

“B word?” you ask.

“The indigenous peoples of this land have suffered enough under the yoke of our prejudice. That’s over with. Evolve,” Latina Cop says.

“And, just so you know, Sasquatch feet are nearly perfectly proportioned to their bodies, sir. Its science,” she continues.

“By next week that kind of language will be a hate crime. Evolve.” Unibrow says.

“Am I having a stroke? Because I can’t tell if . . . “

“I’m sorry. What’s your name, sir?” Unibrow asks.

“Not sure I have one,” you say.

” Not you,” Unibrow says.

“Could just be an old head injury,” you continue to mumble to whomever.

“I go by Aiken,” Sasquatch says. “My indigenous name only translates through a totally separate dance.”

“Had a temp job testing football helmets once. Fired me for unexplained memory loss,” you ramble on.

“You want to explain what?”

“Explain how you did the mating dance,” Aiken yells at you.

“A mating what?”

“This,” Sasquatch says as he reenacts your movements from your eviction dance in your kitchen. He first points at the Latina cop, then he points both thumbs backwards over his shoulders, then he points both his pointing fingers up at the sky, then slowly he lowers both hands down to the street at his feet, same as you did except with some extra moves in between, more rhythm and way more suggestive thrusting of his pelvis.

“Did you do the dance, sir?” Latina Cop asks.

“That wasn’t a dance. That’s not what I was doing.”

The police officers just stare at you like a yeti with a half a pigeon.

“Where would I have even heard of the mating dance?” you protest.

Unibrow rolls his eyes at you. “Uh, hello? Like maybe everywhere.”

“Dude,” Latina Copy tells her partner, “I watched like every show on The Discovery Channel’s first ever ‘Yetiweek’.”

“It was the best, right?” Unibrow agrees.

“So good.”

“Tik Tok has the best mating dance tutorials though.”

“Yeah? Try Only Sasquatch.”

Unibrow looks at his partner, surprised.

“What?!” she asks

“Nothing,” he says. “I’ve seen like ten different versions. They are all, like, hypnotic. The one on PBS’s Nature is graphic.”

You look back and forth between the two cops lost in this alternate dimension, dumbfounded.

Finally, Latina Cop remembers you’re there too. “Did you do the mating dance or not, sir.”

“Are you stupid or something?” you spit at her.

Latina Cop’s face is still beautiful, even when it is twisted into an expression that screams “Look how pissed off I am at you right now.”

You take a step back. You turn to her partner. His mouth is open. His eyes are wide. His single eyebrow is so high on his forehead it is almost his hairline.

“It’s a Big . . . It’s a Sasquatch,” you correct. “Who would be turned on by a Sasquatch?”

Latina Cop’s frown flickers. She glances at Aiken. She blushes.

Shit.

Okay. Change of tactics?

“I’m not knocking the next . . . person. I am just saying that I am a happily married man who happens to not be into that sort of thing.”

Sasquatch smiles saying, “He’s a liar. He likes yetis, he likes dudes, and he like them young, too.”

“That is slander unless you can prove it,” you shoot back.

Sasquatch’s smile grows. It is like a shark but happier.

Unibrow calls it in. Back-up arrives. Some of your neighbors had shown up just in time to hear you call a hardworking, first generation, Mexican American woman of law enforcement, a stupid ass bitch, or something like that. You are escorted to your home. More officers arrive. More neighbors appear. They brief each other. They come closer.

Crime scene tape goes up. The people who live on your street line the border of your property like the fence you wish you had. They stand close to the officers and speak softly. The parents keep a hand on their kids and an eye on you, as if the overwhelming police presence isn’t sufficient to deter you from mayhem. Everyone frowns at you.

Your street is blocked off. More police show up. Latina Cop greets the new arrivals. They smile at her. She stands close to them. She whispers to them. They frown at you.

You are left sitting on your own front porch steps. Your butt cheeks having long ago fallen asleep. Two officers bulky enough to be Sasquatch’s illegitimate children keep their disapproving eyes on you. Your home is full of local police and Federal agents. FBI, DHS, Fish and Wildlife. They all walk very officially, in and out of your front door, with seeming purpose and official posture. They talk to each other about a smell and the general condition of your house as they walk past. You hear phrases like “…made Aiken eat live pigeons and dogs” . . . “empty pill bottles. It’s a wonder Aiken didn’t overdose” and “…trapped inside a closet that long you’d shit yourself too.” as they walk past.

A uniformed officer comes out to light up a cigarette. He stands over you not looking down as if you might be a potted plant.

“You own this house?” he asks, not even glancing in your direction.

“Of course I own it. Who’d rent a dump like this?”

“I’ve seen worse,” he says. “Nice neighborhood.”

“Yeah, well, it will be better once you all get the hell out.”

The officer looks down long enough to establish a second of eye contact. “How will you know? When we leave you’ll be in handcuffs.”

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter either way. You’ll lose your house in the civil suit.”

“Civil suit?”

“Of course. Sasquatchs always file civil suits. And they always win, too” the officer says, shaking his head.

“How the hell do you know . . . “

The officer snorts a jagged piece of derisive laughter. “Those fuckers get whatever they want. Plus,” he begins, blowing a stream of smoke as he checks for wandering ears, “Bigfoots are in right now. Your neighbors will probably testify against you just to have him as their neighbor. It’s sure to raise their property values.”

You look back to the yellow crime scene tape. There are a lot of narrowed eyes on you. When they see you looking they bob their heads like horny Sasquatch.

“You are screwed, man,” the officer says.

Time is irrelevant. You sit on your porch watching the comings and goings of law enforcement of all kinds. Not once does any ask if you need anything. Not once does anyone ask you what happened. No one has even taken any official statement from you.
After forever long an officer in a plaid suit with a gold detectives shield hanging on a chain comes out. He has a fedora. He uses your first name without offering his own. He tells you to follow him into your home. He says he has some questions for you about some items in your bedroom. He walks behind you. He keeps his hand firmly on your shoulder as he leads you into your house.

The smell inside your home hits you very hard now, since you have been outside in the fresh air. Your best approximation to this smell would be a mixture of boiling dumpster juice inside of a recently abandoned kennel.

Your basement door is open. Two figures in white full body hazardous material suits, hoods secure, respirators on extra tight, climb the stairs. One places a hand on the other’s shoulder and says, “We’ll get through this. Just do the job.”

“What’s in my basement?” you ask the plaid-suited detective.

He shakes his head at you. “I’m not qualified to discuss that kind of thing. Thank god.”

“What?”

A woman in a jacket with the letters CSI in big yellow letters across its back is holding an evidence bag up for another to see. Inside is a bloody dog collar with red smears.

You know that the little brass plate on it says Einstein. She frowns daggers at you as she passes. A rat dog owner herself, no doubt.

The detective stops you at the bottom of the stairs to wait for two officers coming down to pass. Sasquatch and Latina Cop stand close nearby, in private conversation.

“You do the mating dance better than anyone else I’ve seen, Aiken,” Latina Cop purrs.

Sasquatch replies in flawless Spanish while brushing a loose lock of hair from the smiling Latina cop’s beautiful face to behind her ear, before saying, “You should see the dance that is my indigenous name . . . in private, of course.”

At the top of the stairs another plainclothes officer is waiting. He ushers you into your bedroom where everything that was anywhere is now on the floor.

The new detective asks you how long you’ve been into yetis. His eyes have the crow’s feet of a man who either smiles or squints too much.

Your patience is at its thinnest as you again deny any attraction to once mythical monsters.

The two detectives wait for you to say more, but you’re no fool, you watch enough Law & Order to know that anything you say can be used against you. You say nothing else.

“We can’t help you unless you help us,” the first detective says.

“I don’t need help. I have right on my side,” you say.

“Wright. That your last victim’s name?”

Before you can respond Crow’s Feet says,” A lot of empty pill bottles downstairs. You got a hell of an opioid addiction.”

Before you can reply, plaid suit asks, “Who needs all that lubricant anyway?”

“And those lips?” his partner says. ” That’s just trying too hard.”

“Since they pushed up the date of that Senate hearing those laws went into effect today.”

Plaid says, “You’ll be the first test of the Endangered Peoples Act. What you did to Aiken is gonna make you the most hated man on earth.”

“Car’s pretty banged up,” Crow’s Feet says. “Did a piss poor job washing the blood and hair off your bumper. Pretty deep dent too. You didn’t even try to slow down, did you?”

You take a deep mindful breath. “I couldn’t stop myself. Okay? You don’t know until you’ve slid into a Sasquatch, detective.”

“Ohh.”Plaid yells.

“Heyy.” Crow’s Feet says.

“The hell!”

“You perverts are all alike. You think everyone is as gross as you. Well, let me tell you something. We spoke to your wife. She’s already cooperating. She’s just relieved she left you before you did to her what you did to poor Aiken.”

“She didn’t leave me. She’s visiting family.”

Crow’s Feet shrugs. “Okay. Sure. Let’s go with that. This is all just one big misunderstanding, right? So how about you earn some points by telling the truth.”

You’ve seen too many episodes of Law &Order SVU to fall for that one.

“Doesn’t matter anyway,” Plaid says, “You’re textbook sociopath. Estranged wife. Creepy search history. House full of physical evidence.”
“Sketchy employment history,” his partner adds. “And the scene on that basement floor. Who would even collect . . . ” the detective shakes his head unable to finish.

“What is in the basement?” you ask.

“You inject your own lips or what?” Plaid asks. Before you can answer he continues. “You have a history of animal cruelty. Weren’t you cited for animal cruelty 5 years ago for painting someone’s dog?”

” I had a dog painting service. I was paid to do that,” you say.

“The dog pay you? Because I read where the poor fella had to have some skin grafts because of you.”

From beyond your bedroom, you hear laughter coming from inside your home. A thump. Someone is disturbing your furniture. Yours.

“What do you have against animals?” Crow’s Feet asks.

Conversations are happening inside your house. They are all talking about you. Inside your home. Yours.

“A squirrel get ahold of you when you were little? Get the business end of it?” Plaid Suit asks.

People are doing to your home what the yeti did. They are doing whatever they want.

” Had to be something drastic to cause a man to turn into a weirdo of your caliber.” Crow’s Feet sneers.

You take in the most mindful breath you can. It is full of anger. When you exhale what comes out is:

“Screw you. Screw you all,” you yell. “You stupid useless cops can all kiss my shiny white ass. You come into my home and touch my things and call me names. I am the victim here. I am the one you should be protecting. But instead, you gang up on me, accusing me of disgusting crimes, with your sick sexual fantasies about giant hairy monsters. It’s you who are the perverts. It’s you who are the weirdos. You who take the word of a wild stinking beast over your own kind. You are a disgrace to your profession, your species, to, to- Everyone,” you sputter. “For the last time I am not attracted to a goddamn Bigfoot” you scream.

Your home is finally deafeningly quiet. Quieter than it has been since you invited a yeti to stay there. Quieter than when your wife was nagging you before she left with what you now realize was a few suitcases and all her jewelry. In all that quiet you notice the two detectives are not looking at you. They are looking past you, behind you.

You turn around to find an unfamiliar Sasquatch standing in the doorway to your bedroom. Others are crowded around him. All their eyes are on you.

The new yeti is also wearing the same expression of open-eyed, open-mouthed shock as Aiken did when you used the “B” word outside. And this unfamiliar Sasquatch is also wearing a chain with a gold shield hanging low against its hairy chest.

“We got this Trevor. It hits too close to home for you,” Plaid Suit says to the new Sasquatch.
Trevor the detective yeti nods his head, like a horned-up yeti, tears welling up in his bright green eyes as it turns to leave.

When you look back to the detectives in your bedroom you see the collective anger of a lynching party in their stares.

“Just got his shield,” Crow’s Feet says.

“We’ve come so far, and when we get here you’re here too,” his partner adds.

“Hate speech was included in the new laws on the treatment of indigenous peoples. Add that racial slur and it all gets bumped up to a Class A federal offense. You are screwed.”

You inhale the most mindful breath that anyone anywhere has ever inhaled. When you exhale you feel all your pointless useless anger leave you. Your body feels better having rid itself of the toxins inside your angry thoughts.

To the two detectives you say, “I am not who you think I am.”

Plaid Suit doesn’t respond. Instead, he reaches down and slides a box from under your bed. It is your forgotten 50-disk box of asserted oddities Blue Ray porn DVDs. He lifts out three plastic evidence bags. Inside them are three DVDs. They have all been removed from their original cellophane wrappers. There are deep scratches on their clear plastic cases. The detective holds the plastic evidence bags up so you can read the titles on the spines of the three videos.

The depth of your predicament hits you like lightning striking so close that its thunder sounds simultaneously. You feel the blood drain from your face. The room tilts. When you go to sit on the bed you miss it completely and come down hard on your rear on the floor.

The three DVDs inside the bags are titled “Sasquatch Freakout 3,” “Drugged and Bound Yetis 5″ and “Big Butt Bigfoot 10,” the extended version with 18 minutes of never-before-seen mating dances and director’s commentary. There is a reddish-brown hair trapped inside the case of the last one.

As you sit on the floor of your bedroom, inside your home, the detectives inform you that your internet service provider has already informed the authorities that on the night that you are known to have brought a yeti home under the cover of darkest night you did have your internet service reinstated using your password, abc123. And that your account is overdrawn due to all the charges for someone’s many visits to the website called “Only Sasquatch.”

What would you do if your face was all over television and social media because you are facing first of charges of abduction of a Sasquatch, possession of a jerk movie featuring an underage yeti, a laundry list of associated criminal offenses with a hate crime kicker?