Monday, November 14, 2011

  

#15

     “Come here, Brian. What do you see?”

     Twelve-year-old Brian squinted and wrinkled his thin nose, concentrating on the side of the barn where Mike’s finger pointed. “What am I supposed to be seeing, Mikey Boy?”

      Fourteen-year-old Mike frowned and jabbed harder at the barn. “There, did you see it?” Brian moved his head from side to side, not seeing a thing. 

     Mike shoved his bare feet into his running shoes and motioned for his little brother to dress and do the same. “Come on let’s go. It’s a bigfoot! I saw a bigfoot!”

     “You’re crazy! I’m not going chasing after a bigfoot. You go by yourself ... .” BOOM ... CRASH...─The noises interrupted Brian. “What was that?” Brian joined Mike at the window.

     “Bigfoot! Airhead! He knocked down the metal shed! Now come on, put on your shoes.”
   
    “I don’t know. Aren’t you afraid?”
   
   “Course not.” Mike waved his metal baseball bat, with a silly questioning expression plastered on his red-excited face, like he was saying “Who’d question his reasoning, with a bat and all.”

     Brian laughed. He really thought a lot of his older brother. Mostly, he loved him because he was a funny guy. Mike got a big kick out of making people laugh.

     “Come on kid, let’s go.” They both eased through the front door and stepped onto the squeaky wood porch. A piece of firewood rolled from the stack in the corner. The brothers both jumped and tried not to laugh at each other’s jitteriness. A neighbor’s rooster crowed.

     Young Brian was feeling scared. The sun wasn’t even completely up. From inside the house, the brother’s dad yelled for them to keep the noise down. “Mike, I’m going back to bed. You go.”

     “Ah, come on. What if it gets me? You got to protect me kid.” Mike had both hands around his neck with his tongue hanging out. Brian smiled and followed his brother to the barn.

     “Mike look.” The bigfoot was swaying from side to side near the fir tree inside the garden gate. The boys froze where they stood.
“She’s got a baby on her back. Look Mike, you see it?”

     “Yeah, I see it,” Mike whispered. “Look, at what’s in her hand.”

     “Where?” Brian squinted hard, looking where Mike pointed.

     “Near her knee. It’s another baby. It looks dead. She’s looking mean!”

     “Let’s get out of here. If she’s anything like a bear, she might come after us.”

     Just as Brian finished speaking the neighbor’s big, mixed- breed dog leaped the garden gate and barked crazily at the bigfoot. The mother bigfoot dropped the baby bigfoot in its hand, grabbed the dog by the neck and flung it at the boys. When they again focused on where the bigfoot and dog had been, nothing was there. They raced to the spot and caught a glimpse of her as she disappeared into the dark woods.

     The brothers examined the infant bigfoot until they were satisfied that, that was what it was, all right. They spent the rest of the morning burying it and hauling the dog back to the neighbor. It was a hard sell convincing the neighbor that they’d just come upon his dog dead.
    
     Mike and Brian, while burying the newborn bigfoot, decided not to tell anyone about their sighting and especially about where the baby bigfoot was buried.  They were longtime savvy readers of the Internet and knew they didn’t want to drag themselves and their family into the strange world of “discovering bigfoot.”

The End


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