Breakfast With Bigfoot

   I came downstairs one morning after a night of fitful sleep to find Bigfoot in my living room, reading the latest issue of Reader’s Digest. He wore an orange hunting jacket and asked if I would mind getting him a cup of coffee since I was up. The experience frazzled me so much that I accidentally brought him tea. I handed it to him, and he accepted it with a look of quiet but understanding disappointment.
   “I’m terribly sorry to impose on you,” he said in his rather charming vibrato, “but this is the only house for miles. Would it be possible for me to stay here for a few days? I’ve gotten into a bit of a mess with some hunters –nothing that’ll put you in any sort of trouble, of course. Just a minor scuffle, really- but I need to lay low for a while. Figure out how to handle this.”
   I felt very peaceful hearing his speech, since I thought it was a dream, and if I was dreaming that meant I was sleeping and getting some much-needed rest. I had a lazy, dreamy smile and half-open eyelids as he explained to me how he would sleep on the pullout couch and he’d be so quiet I’d hardly even know he was there and he’d even cook for me. He seemed nice enough, and very well groomed. “Sure, Bigfoot,” I said, grinning. “Why not.”
   “Please,” he replied. “Call me Norm.”
   “Well, Norm,” I said in a way-too-cheerful voice, “you can sleep in the guest bedroom. It’s much nicer. And I’m Nancy Singer- no, wait. I’m not Nancy Singer anymore. I don’t even get to keep my name. I’m Nancy Palowski now. You can call me Nan.”
   Norm smiled and offered me him hand, the only hairless part of him. I grasped it and shook it. Then I thought to myself How odd. I could feel the smooth flesh against my own, a firm pressure that was nothing like the numbness characteristic of most of my dreams.
   “Is everything alright, Nan?” Norm asked when I hadn’t stopped shaking his hand after a minute or so. I looked up at the creature and tried to think if yetis were rumored to have big, sharp teeth or not. I could feel my heart beat from my toes to my brain.
   I let go of his hand abruptly. “Everything’s fine. Fine.” I coughed to clear my throat, which had, of its own resolve, decided to make it impossible for me to swallow. “I’m going to go… take a shower. Upstairs.”
   “Oh. Alright.” He watched me go upstairs and called up after me “Are you sure you don’t mind me staying here?”
   “It’s fine,” I called down and went into the bathroom. Inside the white tiled walls, over the porcelain sink, in the medicine cabinet, were a variety of anti-depressants. I checked their labels to see if hallucinations were common occurrences. None of them directly said “hallucinations” on their lists of side effects, but the one with the green pills did make mention of “brief psychological disturbances.” I poured those pills into the toilet and flushed them down. Relieved that I’d solved my problem, I got into the shower.
   There was a knock at the bathroom door. “Nan?”
   “What is it?” I asked as I shampooed my hair.
   “Do you have another bathroom in your house?”
   “Downstairs. The door by the fridge.”
   “Thank you.”
   I hummed as I scrubbed and tried to decide whether I should call my doctor right away or to wait until after breakfast.
   I got out and began dressing for work when I remembered it was Saturday, so I put on some comfy old jeans and a t-shirt Tim had gotten me on our anniversary trip to Vegas five years before. The t-shirt upset me, so I took it off and put on a pink button down shirt. I looked at myself in the mirror. I wasn’t bad to look at. In fact, I was prettier than “the other woman,” the one Tim had married two months ago as soon as the divorce was final. She was actually quite homely. And old. But being prettier and younger than her didn’t make me any happier. It just meant that he truly liked her better than me, not just because she seduced him with her good looks. She had personality. I had a mixture of residual anger at my long-dead parents and escalating depression. Now she had my husband, my kids, and my last name, and they all lived in a mansion on the good side of town. I had Bigfoot taking a shit in my downstairs bathroom. Well, at least I got to keep the house.
   
   He was still there during breakfast. True to his word, he cooked for me. It was the best omelet I had ever had, even if I was convinced the omelet wasn’t real. He set the table with the nice china and the table mats and sat across from me, looking like an adult sitting at a child’s tea party with his knees halfway up to his chin.
   He sipped his coffee and tried to make polite small talk. “So… what do you do for a living?”
   “I work fifty hours a week at Meijers so I can keep living indoors, eating store-bought food, and wearing clothes,” I grumbled. I listened to myself whine and felt a flush try to creep onto my cheeks. Trying to think of what else I could talk to a mythical creature about, I asked, “So do you have any children?”
   He shook his head. “I just can’t find anyone to settle down with. All the women I meet I have nothing in common with. They want to go out clubbing, but I’d much rather stay home with a game of Parcheesi.” He struggled to maneuver my human-sized silverware without bending it. “What about you?”
   I chewed my eggs with malice. “I had a husband. I squeezed out three kids and raised them from infancy to puberty. I had a nice life and nice things.” I clenched my fists and frowned so hard it hurt.
   Norm reached out one of those large hands and patted my own. “I’m sorry I mentioned it. Divorce is a very sad thing. My parents went through it themselves. It was awful.”
   “Oh, I’m not sad,” I hissed. “I’m angry. I’m very angry. It’s not my fault I didn’t know any good enough lawyers. It’s not my fault it happened.” God, it was good to talk to somebody who wasn’t being paid half my salary to listen.
   There was a moment of tooth-grinding silence. “So… some weather we’ve been having, eh?”
   
   Norm was still there while I looked for my address book so I could call Dr. Stevenson. He helped me look for it. In fact, he was the one who found it. I took it and the cordless phone upstairs to my bedroom and dialed the number.
   “Do hallucinations do things like cook you delicious breakfast and find your address books for you?” I asked the doctor.
   “Nan, is this a serious question?” she asked.
   “Yes! It is. The green pills, I forget what they’re called—”
   “Seratonex.”
   “Yes, the Seratonex. It says something about brief psychological disturbances. Now, how long are we talking, here? Does brief mean a few hours, a few minutes?”
   “Well, it depends on the person. Nan, is everything alright?” The doctor’s voice was the matter-of-fact sort that came from dealing with people who had much bigger problems than me and sympathy for me was hard to muster up.
   “I don’t know,” I murmured. “I mean, he made me breakfast and I could feel his hand on my own. But that could just be all in my head.”
   “Nan, it’s perfectly normal to be worried about dating again after what you’ve been going through.”
   “No—”
   “You need to tell yourself yes, he is really there and he’s not a dream or a figment of your imagination.”
   “No—”
   “Nancy, you’re talking to the wrong person about this. You need to hang up the phone, and go talk to him about your insecurities. Okay?” I tried to protest, but she wouldn’t let me. “You’re scheduled for an appointment Friday afternoon. We can talk more about it then, alright?”
   I gave up. “Alright.”
   “In the meantime, why don’t you stop taking the Seratonex.”
   “I wasn’t planning on taking them anyway.”
   “You have a good day.”
   I sighed. “You too.” The phone began to hum its dial tone.
   I walked back to the kitchen where Norm had begun doing dishes. I pinched him.
   “What was that for?”
   “I was trying to see if I was dreaming.”
   “Aren’t you supposed to pinch yourself instead?”
   I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not dreaming.” I grabbed a towel and began to dry.
   
   I flopped on the couch and turned on the TV as is my Saturday afternoon ritual. Norm grabbed the remote from my hand and turned it off. “You shouldn’t watch so much television,” he said. “How about a nice game of Cribbage?”
   I wasn’t about to argue with someone who could easily break me in half, so I let him get the board out and deal out the cards. He beat me. Every single time. He gave me encouraging words every time I lost, like “It’s really all the luck of the cards,” or “You’re getting better, really.”
   After he’d beaten me at Scrabble, Gin, and the fastest game of Monopoly in the history of the world, I had the slight suspicion that perhaps Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) were the smartest beings on the planet, pushing my species to an honorable but slightly embarrassing third place (behind the dolphins).
   “I’m tired of this,” I said, throwing my cards on the table with a heavy sigh. I looked longingly at the TV. A gunshot resounded from the woods behind the house and we both jumped at the sound. I grumbled under my breath. Tim had bought the house to be close to his favorite deer hunting spot. It would have made much more sense for him to keep the house and let me live somewhere else. I’d have moved out a long time ago if not for the hassles of real estate.
   Norm and I looked at each other, hoping the other one had an idea of how to spend the rest of the afternoon, since cards had proved detrimental to my self-esteem.
   “That’s it. I’m watching TV,” I said, throwing up my hands to stop him from objecting. “Do you have a better idea?”
   “Parcheesi?”
   I turned the TV on.
   There was nothing I particularly wanted to watch. Does anyone ever turn on the TV on a Saturday afternoon because they want to watch a specific show? No. They watch it because they’re too bored or too boring to do anything else. Norm read a book.
   I watched a few minutes of an infomercial for a new kitchen appliance that was guaranteed to change the way I ate and help me lose weight, and a few minutes of a reality show that further convinced me that humans were a lot farther down on the intelligence scale than we like to think we are.
   And then I watched the news.
   If you’ve ever seen anyone you know on the news, then you’ll know how surprising it can be, either good or bad. If you see your neighbor on the news for their heroic efforts in rescuing a small child with no feet from a burning tree in the middle of a hurricane while hungry wolves snap at his heels, it’s a good surprise, and it gives you a warm feeling inside. When you see your ex-husband on the news with the caption “Local Hunter Killed,” it makes you feel chilly inside. But the shiver I felt creeping down my spine came from the knowledge that I knew just who’d done it. I glanced at the chair where Norm had been sitting, but it was empty. I heard the toilet flush and quickly changed the channel to a cooking show about the many uses of spiced eel eggs.
   “Have you ever tried spiced eel eggs?” I asked him when he came out.
   “No. Are they good?”
   “I don’t imagine so.” Now, how to connect spiced eel eggs conversationally to the questions burning inside me? “You know what does sound good? Beef jerky. My hus- my ex-husband likes to take it out hunting.”
   “Ah,” he responded nonchalantly.
   “So…” I paused. “May I ask just what this ‘trouble with some hunters’ was?”
   “Oh, it was nothing, really,” he said, not looking up from his book.
   “Nothing? Suuuuuuuuuuure. I’m sure it was nothing!”
   “You’re being very strange, Nan.”
   “I’m strange? I’m strange? Who’s the man-eating Yeti in this room? I don’t think it’s me. Well then, it must be you!”
   My rant was cut short by the ringing of the phone. “Did you hear about Dad?” my oldest boy Jake asked. His voice was steady but raspy, the result of crying for an hour and now having no tears left.
   “Yes I did. I’m so sorry, Honey. Are you okay?”
   There was a sniff. “Yeah. It’s still kind of a shock. I can’t believe he’s gone.” His voice wavered. “He had a hunting accident.”
   “I know. Just awful. Have they found the animal who killed him?”
   “It was John, Mom.” Tim’s hunting buddy. “They’ve got him in custody but it really was an accident. Dad wasn’t wearing his hunting vest and John accidentally shot him. Thought he was a deer.”
   I frowned. “Shot? He wasn’t shot. He was mauled to death by a wild animal.”
   “God, Mom,” he wailed. “How could you say that? Sure the divorce was bad, but why would you say something like that? He’s dead and you’re still mad at him.” I could hear him struggling not to cry. “I… I saw his body, Mom. He was shot, okay? Bullet in the chest.”
   I glanced over at Norm’s chair but he was gone. “I have to go, Jake.”
   “Whatever,” he grunted and hung up on me.
   Norm was just around the corner, shaking his head sadly. “You think I killed your husband?” he asked.
   “I… But it makes sense.”
   “What kind of monster do you think I am?” asked the Bigfoot. “Oh, I’m out of your range of normalcy! I must be a barbaric killer! Look at me! I’m a big scary monster! Rar!”
   I blushed. “You said you’d gotten into trouble with some hunters.”
   “Yeah, I owed them money. I didn’t have it and they were looking for me. Said they were going to call the Weekly World News.” He shook his head again. “You know, I should probably leave.”
   “No, I— Norm!” I reached a hand up to touch his shoulder, but he shrugged it off and opened the sliding glass door out into the backyard. “Fine then! I’ve got other stuff to deal with!”
   He looked at me as he closed the door. “It really was a pleasure to meet you, Nan. You know. Up until you accused me of being a savage murderer.” The door shut with a click.
   He had left the orange hunting jacket on the couch. I picked it up. It smelled sasquatch-ey, which was not an unpleasant smell, and mixed in was a faint scent that seemed familiar to me, something I had smelled before, but I couldn’t place it. I brought it to my nose to get a bigger whiff, and my eye caught the hand-sewn label. Tim Singer.