and was out of sight. Each long stride and each swing of his lengthy arms brought him great joy as he knew they brought him closer to his meal. As Bigfoot neared a chasm in a stack of stones on the mountainside, he looked to his left and saw a pair of headlights approaching. He hastened to wipe the mud from his feet and entered the chasm. It was alright to be glimpsed by humans every now and then, but he had other more important things on his mind right now, like a squirrel meat sub-sandwich as long as his arm.
Bigfoot ducked into the stone opening, hoping that the fog had hidden him from the drivers of the car, and entered a torch-lit chamber with a series of doors and a desk flanked by fake trees. “Good morning,” Bigfoot said to the lobby attendant of his home, The Crypto-Condo Residential Caves. He raised a furry hand to his temple and tipped it toward her as a sign of greeting.
The lobby attendant smiled warmly. She was some kind of banshee, and was quite sweet when she was not wailing mournfully, which banshees are wont to do from time to time. However, now was not one of those times so she was quite pleasant. “How are you today, Mr. Foot?” she asked, her waist length jet black hair billowing around her despite the absence of wind.
“Now, now, how many times have I told you? There’s no need to be so formal. Just call me Bigfoot. Everyone else does,” Bigfoot said with a chuckle.
“I know, Mr. Foot, but they pay me to be professional and formal, you know,” the banshee said. “I’ll try my best though,” she said with a wink. “Did anyone see you today?”
“No, I don’t think so. We’ll know for sure when the paper comes, I guess,” Bigfoot said, chuckling again. The banshee began to laugh as well, but then her demeanor changed and she began to shriek at the top of her lungs. Bigfoot put his hands over his ears and pressed tightly to drown out the dreadful sound. He mouthed the word “Sorry”, tipped his head in salutation, and walked toward the door that led to his condo-cave. Her eyes had rolled into the back of her head so he was not entirely sure she had even noticed.
Bigfoot had to lean his head forward as he walked down the torch-lit hallway so as not to scrape the top of his head against the bare rock above. “It’s like they intentionally made these hallways too low for sasquatches,” he mumbled to himself as he walked. He had this same thought every day as he returned home, and often considered trying to persuade his fiancé to look into searching for a new home for the two of them. She was really quite fond of the place and the other cryptid creatures that lived there though. He decided he would not bring it up to her, yet again. She did not need the burden of moving piled atop her already arduous task of planning a Bigfoot wedding.
He reached a roughly hewn wooden door with a plaque hanging from it with a giant foot on it and pushed it open. Bigfoot exhaled deeply as he surveyed his cave condo. He was finally home. His fiancé really had done a nice job fixing up the place. Maybe he would not try to persuade her to move after all. It would make a nice starter home, and there would be plenty of other cryptid creatures for their future sasquatch children to socialize and play with.
Bigfoot sniffed the air hopefully, longing for the smell of a hot meal, but there was none. This was not a big deal, by any means. He was well versed in the culinary arts, but the convenience would have been well suited for the moment.
“Babe?” Bigfoot called out, his deep, wild voice reverberating off the rocky walls of his cave. “Babe, I’m home.” He waited for her to reply, but she never did. He furrowed his brow, closed the door, and walked further into the cave.
“Hey, babe?” he said, sticking his head into the bedroom. His fiancé was not there. “Babe?” he called down the hallway leading to the dining room. There was no reply from there either. “Babe?” he said, knocking on the bathroom door. Nothing. Where was she?
It was not a big deal, but he had been anxious to see her. He realized that it must be monotonous to spend the long nights in the cave while he was out wandering through the woods and doing Bigfoot things. She probably just went on a quick jaunt to stretch her legs and clear her mind. He decided that he would plan a trip for the two of them so that she could get away from the cave and the wedding planning for a while.
Smiling at the thought of her face when he would tell her that they would be going away on a vacation, he opened the refrigerator door. His smile disappeared at once as he saw that the refrigerator was completely empty. Nothing! Not a carton of wombat milk, not a sliver of eel, and worst of all – not a single squirrel with which to make a squirrel meat sub-sandwich. There was nothing. It was absolutely devoid of anything but a scrap of paper.
“Hey babe,” the note began. “Mom and Pop dropped in for an unexpected visit. They were famished and ate everything…”
Bigfoot closed his eyes, leaned his forehead against the top of the refrigerator, and sighed deeply. His future in-laws had a bad habit of surprise visits. His fiancé was an adopted sasquatch, her mother being a yeti and her father being a lake monster of some sort. Bigfoot had always been too embarrassed to ask exactly what kind of lake monster her father was, but knew he was a lake monster nonetheless. That also explained why every single morsel of food was gone. Her father had quite the appetite. He opened his eyes and continued reading the note.
“Sorry, babe. I know you must be starving. Could you please run down to the crypto-grocery store and restock the refrigerator and cupboards?”
The cupboards too? Bigfoot opened up every cupboard and groaned angrily as he examined their empty shelves.
“I’m out showing them around the bogs, swamps, and mountainsides. Sorry for the inconvenience, but they won’t be staying for long, I promise. Love you, my furry little missing link ;).”
Bigfoot folded the note up and placed it in his wallet. He saved every note his fiancé wrote to him. He felt giddy every time he saw her handwriting form the words “love you”. He closed the refrigerator door and marched back to the front door of their condo-cave, swinging his arms in a wide arc with each step, as was his habit.
“Leaving so soon, Mr. Foot? I mean, uh, Bigfoot?” the lobby attendant banshee asked. She had returned to her non-wailing self and she looked up at Bigfoot from her desk inquisitively as her dark hair floated around her face.
“Oh, yes, but I won’t be gone long,” Bigfoot said. Her eyes began to roll into the back of her head again, and her mouth gaped wide, inhaling deeply, as Bigfoot trod toward the door hoping to exit before she started screaming.
He made it just in time. He could hear the muffled wails through the rock opening, but it was not nearly as loud as it would have been inside the stony chamber. Looking around, he saw no cars and no people, so he began to walk up the mountainside. It had been a long time since he had been to the crypto-grocery store himself. His fiancé did not approve of his taste in groceries, so she usually did the shopping for the household.
After walking several hundred yards, Bigfoot approached an enormous dead oak tree with a hollow split down the middle of trunk. The scent of freshly baked bread wafted from deep within the tree. Bigfoot smiled lazily, thinking of all the tasty things he could do with freshly baked bread, and stepped inside the crack.
An ornately carved wooden spiral staircase led down beneath the surface of the earth and into the entrance area of the crypto-grocery store. The beeping of cash registers met Bigfoot’s ears as the doors slid open at his approach. A blast of cool air ruffled the fur on his head and shoulders as he passed through them. They slid shut as he passed. The torches in the walls and the candles in the wrought iron chandeliers hanging from the ceiling reflected off the polished tiles made of hard woods on the floor. The smell of the bread in the bakery, and many more enticing smells mingled together and made the prospect of grocery shopping an enviable task. Bigfoot had always heard that it was a bad idea to shop for groceries on an empty stomach, and he made a mental note not to buy too much food.
He picked up a basket and then placed it back down, opting for a shopping cart since he was shopping for four. In his days as a bachelor, he never
needed anything more than the basket. He found the shopping cart to be a bit awkward to control. One of the wheels seemed to do nothing at all. It sort of just spun in place and revolved around and around no matter what direction he pushed it. Bigfoot recalled the dwarf-made carts of his youth, when his sasquatch mother used to push him around the grocery store. Those were some well-crafted carts, but these modern ones just did not hold a candle to them, he thought. Also, they seemed to have been built for much smaller cryptids, meaning that he had to hang his arms as low as they would go, slumping his shoulders in order to grip the handlebar of the shopping cart.
Bigfoot pushed the cart to the right of the entrance doors, toward the produce section. He held a bright red tomato up to the torch light, turning it and examining it, pressing against it to judge its firmness. It was no good. He picked up another and it was a still a little firm, but it would do. He moved on, surveying the multicolored rows of fruits and vegetables, and tried to remember what his fiancé’s father liked to eat. He thought he was from Canada… or was it Scotland? Either way, he would like potatoes, he reasoned.
“Everybody likes potatoes,” Bigfoot chuckled to himself, placing a fifty pound bag of