Monsters of Loving Grace

In the gleaming gloaming ’neath the northern lights, Yeti slipped over Highway 281 toward the long, black, snaky waters of Richmond Lake. Years of following tracks, sniffing tufts of hair, spying on madmen with cameras — all her research and hunting led her to this place on this night. She paused beside the road, losing the scent for a moment, crossed, picked it up again on the other side, continued.

Crouching at the water’s edge, intently watching slow ripples spread from dropped stones, Sasquatch waited for the arrival of his aquatic oracle.

Yeti’s heart quickened when she saw Sasquatch. Having secured a position in the trees, she leapt down from her perch onto Sasquatch’s back, biting his neck and burying her face in his fur, which was musky and redolent of the boulangeries of his native Quebec.

The two beasts wrestled for hours, thinking into each other’s minds. Their sentences, at first discrete units, became the broken halves of shared ideas, and then, finally, became a rhythmic silent singing in unison, harmony, unison, harmony.

“Hunting…”

“…searching…”

“How long…?”

“…hundreds of years.”

“I’d started to believe…”

“…you didn’t exist.”

Nessie rose from the lake, trailing verdant algae and nodding serpentine approval. A distant werewolf howled syncopated blue notes while a murder of vampires flew overhead, batty wings gently flapping. The re-united halves of a fractured myth flowed back into one, all watched over by monsters of loving grace.

All apologies to Richard Brautigan.

This entry is part of my journal, published July 6, 2005, in New York.