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“What are you waiting for,” the voice at my feet asked. “Don’t tell me that you have already forgotten how to tell my story?”
It was Bigfoot that was talking to me.
Now if this was some kind of a horror zombie monster movie it probably wouldn’t have bothered me one little bit but there is something more than just a little bit disturbing about having a Sasquatch’s decapitated head talking at you like you ought to know better.
I stammered a little.
I’m not sure I made any kind of sense.
“What the, holy, oh my, what the, golly,” was about how it came out along with a half-a-dozen startled grunts and at least one dry spit take.
“I keep telling you things and you just don’t listen,” one-ninth-of-a-Bigfoot said to me. “I get the feeling that you are either totally stupid, half-deaf or maybe you just don’t quite understand the workings of the Queen’s own English.”
“But you’re dead,” I finally spat out. “I saw you die.”
“I’m not dead,” one-ninth-of-a-Bigfoot said. “I’m a story. Stories don’t really die – not the way that people die – not so long as other people remember to tell them out loud.”
“But he pulled your head off,” I said. “I saw it happen.”
“Sure he pulled my head off,” one-ninth-or-maybe-even-one-tenth-(because-math-was-never-my-strong-point)-of-a-Bigfoot said. “But that isn’t really all there is to me. All that my head and body are is nothing more than a wrapping for the whole entire story of me. My memories and my legends and the things that I have done and the things that people THINK I’ve done – that’s the real meat of me. That’s where I live and breathe. Decapitation doesn’t do a thing to somebody built like I am.”
I chewed on that concept for just a little bit.
As theories go it was pretty hard to swallow.
“So if I tell your story out loud you are going to grow back?” I asked. “Belly, arms, legs, feet and all?”
“If you tell it well enough,” one-ninth-or-tenth-or-maybe-even-one-sixteenth-of-a-Bigfoot replied. “You were starting well enough at the beginning. I could feel the spark burning behind your words but then you got all bogged down in disbelief and wonder and worrying about a simple little thing like a Sasquatch head re-growing itself and you went and forgot just which way were going.”
I chewed on that notion as well, slowly thinking his words over.
“I think I got it,” I said, not really sure but figuring that if I said I got it often enough then maybe I could full myself into figuring out just what he was talking about.
And then – because I couldn’t figure out what else I ought to do - I just started back into telling that first story and I told just as strong and as true as I could manage to. I told it straight out and I added a little bit along the way. In my story Coyote didn’t just fall off of a cloud. In my story he came para-gliding on a great red and orange and sunrise colored para-glider with bells and whistles and big red fire horns and a couple of shotgun laser gun turrets mounted on each of the para-glider wings.
I took a glance at Coyote but he didn’t seem to be listening at all. He was just staring vaguely into space, like he was dreaming.
I tell you, he was missing himself one heck of a story.
Hey – you go ahead and try sitting in a dark raven cave in Labrador with nothing but a severed Sasquatch head and a stitched-up-lip Coyote to keep you company and see if YOUR imagination doesn’t run a little wild on you.
The funny thing was, as I continued to tell my story I could see that Bigfoot was slowly beginning to grow. First I could see his neck growing out of his severed head like the root of a big fat old dandelion.
“That’s the thing about telling stories,” Bigfoot said.
I could see his great big yellow funky-smelling Sasquatch teeth grinning up at me about as bright as a full-sized set of freshly-Colgated light bulbs.
“After a while,” Coyote said. “They begin to grow on you.”
“A little like mildew,” Bigfoot said. “Or maybe even like creeping mold.”
“Or a bad case of the measles,” Coyote added.
And son of a gun, after a while, those stories did just that.
They grew and they grew.
And so did Bigfoot.