Page 36 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

“Rowan, talk to me. You look like you just saw a ghost, and considering I’m the one with the art history degree, I’m usually the one prone to dramatic haunting metaphors. What is it?” She’s closer now, reaching out as if to touch my arm. She stops just short of contact, her fingers curling into her palm.

I have no words for this feeling. I’ve spent my life in silence, reproducing the sounds of the forest to blend in, to hide, to survive. I don’t have the vocabulary for the terrifying weight of a person who isn’t a guest.

“You are not weather,” I say, the words feeling like stones in my mouth. They’re unadorned, lacking the rhythm of her banter or the precision of her marketing. It’s a blunt statement of fact, the only thing I could offer.

Wren tilts her head to the side, her brow furrowing. “I... what? Is this a compliment? Because if you’re telling me I’m more like a persistent fog or a light drizzle, I’m going to need you to workshop the delivery.”

“No,” I say. Her face is a map of everything I’ve allowed myself to want. The freckles across her nose, the stubborn set of her jaw, the way she never flinches when I loom over her. “Humans are weather. They come, they change the air for a time, and then they go. I have watched a dozen of your generations blow through these trees like a seasonal wind. I have waited for them to pass so I could return to the quiet.”

I take a step toward her, the space between us narrowing until I can feel the heat radiating off her. “I’m not waiting for you to pass, Wren Cassidy. I don’t think you’re going to pass.”

The silence that follows is absolute. Even the creek seems to quiet its chatter. Wren’s eyes widen, the pupils blooming dark until only a thin rim of green remains. She doesn’t laugh or offer a dry, deflating line about my centuries-old social skills. She just stands there, her breath coming out in short, visible puffs in the cool afternoon air.

I’ve rattled her. I can see it in the way she grips the strap of her bag, the knuckles white and sharp. My honesty is a violation of the truce we had built, a breach of the pragmatic business arrangement that protected us both. To acknowledge the permanence is to acknowledge the risk. If she isn’t weather, then she can break things. She can leave scars that won’t heal with the turn of a season.

“Rowan.” The weight in her whisper makes my knees feel heavy. She looks in the direction of the lodge, then at me, her expression flickering between terror and a desperate, fragile hope that I can’t bear to witness.

I can’t stay. I need the deep timber. I need the silence of the hives and the cold, unfeeling stones of the high peaks. I need to remember who I was before I started measuring my life in the seconds between her sentences.

“Go to the lodge,” I say, my voice dropping into the low rumble of the mountain. “Marge and Walt are probably waiting.”

“And you?” She doesn’t move toward me, but she doesn’t step back either. She holds her ground, a tiny, stubborn point of light against the encroaching shadows of the trees.

“I have territories to monitor,” I say. It’s a partial lie. My territory is currently standing on a rock in a creek, and I have no idea how to protect it from myself.

Turning, I walk into the trees. I don’t use the concealment magic immediately. I want to feel the air on my skin, to feel the weight of her gaze on my back until the brush grows thick enough to break the connection. I walk until the sound of her breathing is gone, until the smell of her is replaced by the damp, sharp scent of pine needles and old earth.

When I get to the high ridge, I sit on a fallen cedar. My hands are still trembling. I look at my rough, calloused palms, unchanged by the revelation. I’m still a Guardian, still the creature of legend, the shadow in the trees, the silent neighbor.

But the forest feels different now, empty in a way it’s never felt before.

I’ve spent centuries being the only thing that lasted. Now, I’m just the thing that’s left behind when the rest of the world goes home to a lodge with a leaning sign and a warm kitchen. Closing my eyes, I listen to the wind, but for the first time in a hundred years, I’m not listening for drones or tourists. I’m listening for the sound of a laugh that has rewritten the map of my heart, and the silence is more than I know how to carry.

I don’t go to the hives. I can’t face the bees with their mindless, perfect collective and their rhythmic, humming certainty. They are too much like the forest, predictable in their needs, indifferent in their loyalty. So, I stay where I am and watch the lights of the lodge flicker on one by one. From this height, the building looks like a fallen ember, glowing dimly against the encroaching tide of the night. I watch the golden rectangle of the lobby window, imagining Wren standing behind the desk, her fingers tapping against the wood as she deletes another batch of nonsense from the digital world.

She’s probably angry. Or perhaps she’s merely confused, filing my clumsy confession away under the same category as my refusal to eat bananas. Just another eccentricity of a creature who spent too much time talking to trees. I want to believe that. I want to believe that she could walk back into her life, back to the invoices and the mundane worries of occupancy taxes, and leave me here as a footnote in her family’s ledger. But I know the weight of her silence at the creek. I know how she looked at me, stripped of her banter, her eyes reflecting a gravity that matched my own.

I shift my weight, the bark of the cedar snagging on my trousers. The physical world feels intrusive. Every sensation is a reminder of the night we spent together: the stiffness in my shoulders where she gripped me, the lingering phantom heat on my thighs. For the first time in my existence, my own body feels like a borrowed thing, a vessel that’s been filled with something foreign and is now struggling to contain the pressure. I’m a Guardian, a being of root and stone and ancient memory, yet I’m currently being undone by the simple fact of a human woman’s permanence.

A heavy, cold mist begins to roll down from the higher peaks, a white shroud that swallows the forest and turns the world into a series of gray silhouettes. Normally, I would welcome it. The fog is my ally, a natural veil that does half the work of my concealment for me. Tonight, it feels like a wall. It obscures the lodge, cutting off the light from the lobby, leaving me truly alone in the dark. I stand up, my joints cracking like breaking ice. I should move. I should patrol the north perimeter or check the trail cameras she’s so fond of. I should do anything other than sit here and wait for a feeling to pass that I already know is rooted in the bedrock.

Turning my back on the valley, I walk deeper into the old growth, moving with the silence of a shadow, my feet finding the softest needles, my breath synchronized with the sighing of the firs. But the quiet I seek isn’t here. The forest is loud with the memory of her voice, the trail cluttered with the places where I lifted her over the earth. When I reach the edge of a deep ravine, I look down into the blackness of the ferns. Nobody consulted my instincts about this. Nobody warned me that the price of protection was the loss of self. I have been the mountain’s voice for centuries, but now, as I stand in the thickening mist, I realize I’m no longer speaking for the trees. I’m listening for a heartbeat that doesn’t belong to the woods, and I have no idea how to stop.

20

WREN

SIR, I CAN SEE YOU RIGHT NOW

The humming of the lodge refrigerator is a constant, low-frequency companion that I usually don’t notice until it stops. Right now, it’s the only thing keeping the silence from becoming a physical weight in the kitchen. A single drop of condensation slides down the side of a milk carton, tracing a slow, erratic path through the frost. It’s been four days since the storm and the wonderful night I spent with Rowan, two days since Rowan walked into the timber and left me standing on the edge of a creek with a heart that felt like it had been recalibrated to a frequency I don’t know how to tune.

When I reach for the blue mug with the chipped rim that used to be my father’s, I realize my hand is perfectly steady. It shouldn’t be. By all rights, I should be vibrating with a mix of existential dread and frantic marketing panic. Instead, there’s just this strange, domestic rhythm that has settled over the lodge, a quiet competence that feels like a shared secret between me and the forest.

The hotline pings on the counter. I don’t jump. I don’t even sigh. I just pick up the phone, sliding the thumb-worn screen to see a blurry photo of what is definitely a black bear scratching its back against a cedar. I delete it, then I delete a voicemail from a man in Ohio who wants to know if Sasquatch prefers beef jerky or granola bars. He gets the granola response template, mostly because I’m tired of people leaving cured meats in the parking lot.

“You’re doing that thing again,” Marge says, walking into the kitchen with a tray of empty ramekins. She doesn’t look at me, but Marge has a way of seeing through the back of her head that I’ve never quite mastered. She sets the tray down with a sharp clatter that echoes off the subway tile.

“What thing?” I ask, taking a sip of coffee that has gone cold enough to taste like battery acid.