My Body is a Cage and Other Stories

“What’s our strategy?” she asks.
“I’d hoped you’d come up with one. I’ve never beenin the business of monster hunting.”
The sound of cicadas swells as she explains her plan,the plan she’s been holding on to
for fifteen years now. They won’t literally go huntingfor bigfoot. They’ll set out a few candy
bars on rocks throughout the woods and set a deercamera up near them all to catch anything that
might snag the chocolate. It’s a tried-and-true method.When she was in elementary school, a
man had come out into these woods and done the exactsame thing. He caught a blurry video of a
large, fuzzy creature taking one of the candy bars.It garnered so much attention that the
investigators from a show on the Discovery channelcame to the area to film. They didn’t find
any evidence of any sasquatch, but they bought plentyof girl scout cookies from her troop
outside of the gas station. She was convinced at tenyears old that bigfoot was in the forest and it
was all she talked about for a year or two, then becamea back-burner obsession. She had asked
her parents to take her and friends camping for hersixteenth birthday so they could hunt for him,
but none of her friends wanted to. She hadn’t thoughtabout it for a decade and a half, but when
her father proposed a hunt she felt the old sparkagain.
They set up the cameras while it’s still light outside,and she has to swat her father’s hand
away from the chocolate bars multiple times. Thereare great chunks of quartz that jut out of the
earth here and there that make perfect perches forbait. Through the tall pines, they watch the sky
turn from pink to purple.
Later they eat their hamburgers with the radio droningin the background. Now that there
is no to-do list anymore, the air around them becomesthick with the expectation that the other
will bring it up. She half-wishes nothing ever hadto be said about the decade preceding this. She
half-wishes she had brought her wife along. Jo wouldknow how to make the silence comfortable