Hannah Feustle
Bigfoot At The Zoo
My dad and I used to watch Monsterquest every Wednesday night at 9 – this in the mid-2000s when it was on. We used to say, you think they’re going to find it this time? Mostly they were looking for Bigfoot. We always said that we knew they didn’t find it, because it would have been in the newspaper weeks ago.
Now it is. My dad sends me the NPR article. It’s some random zoo an hour away from where I live in Mississippi that’s gotten a swamp Bigfoot, and installed her in a newly-built enclosure. They have an interview with the director of the zoo and some keepers. I watch the videos later. A khaki-dressed man says, “she’s adjusting really well.” I’m watching these videos in the dark in bed. He says, “We’ve got lots of opportunities for enrichment, and we think she’s settling in.” The videos show visitors swarming to the enclosure, and have to circle where the Bigfoot is, huddled far from everyone.
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I’m teaching Comp and ask my students to free write—should we leave Bigfoot alone, or should we do this with the zoo? Two write busily. One stares at her Calculus homework. One in the front row asks if he can go to the bathroom. We get out forty-five minutes early. I sit in my car after with my head on the wheel.
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The zoo reports that Bigfoot is pregnant. “This is a really exciting time for science,” one of the researchers says, “We have the opportunity to learn about the reproductive system, and this also tells us that there’s a breeding population in the wild.” My dad sends me a New York Times article about how PETA is losing their shit. A protest formed up at the zoo, giant banners with PUT BIGFOOT BACK hung off the gates. A video of a guy punching a protester blows up on Twitter, which produces take after take on the Bigfoot situation. Nobody says anything I want to read, but then again, I don’t know what I want to hear. I always feel like I’m waiting, when I’m scrolling, but I never know what for.
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One Comp student writes her final paper on Bigfoot. She’s made an attempt to use the thesis format I gave them: by looking at X, we can see Y, and this is important because Z. By looking at Bigfoot, she writes, we can see a different type of being. This is important because seeing a different type of being can tell us lots of things. She only does two of the four pages I asked for, but she ends as though struggling for something, writing, as someone who doesn’t have a roommate, I feel like they should put Bigfoot in the enclosure with all the types of monkeys or maybe with the giraffes so she’s not taller than all of them.
There are op-ed pieces coming out in every newspaper about Harry Harlow’s experiments in the ‘60s on rhesus monkeys and suggesting that it’s cruel to keep a Bigfoot alone when we don’t know if they’re social. No one knows what a Bigfoot usually acts like, so no one knows if she’s miserable or not, while she paces the far back of the enclosure, humming to herself, a low, throbbing sound.
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The baby Bigfoot is the size of a premature human baby. The mother won’t touch it. Two weeks after it’s born and tucked into an incubator, the zoo reports the mother Bigfoot’s death. My dad sends me an article. I collapse in tears in my shared office. I say, when asked, that only seven students turned in their final projects. One misspells my last name in his final letter and writes in professor fruitless’s class, we are always confused about what’s going to happen or why.
Within another week, the baby Bigfoot starts to fade. It tears at its own eyes. My dad on the phone says, why didn’t they just leave that poor thing alone? We never really wanted Monsterquest to find anything. It was always the anticipation that made it fun.
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Over the summer I go to the zoo. Rain comes down in sheets. I go through an anti-climactic line, spend $8 getting in. They’re no longer charging $10 for the Bigfoot enclosure. In desperation, the zoo contacted a zoo in Chicago, which brought in a chimpanzee famous for fostering almost any animal they give to her. When I see her, in a low-fenced enclosure, she holds the baby Bigfoot, redder than she is, in the crook of one arm. She hunches over it under a tree, and for a moment she looks out at me, as though to say, what did you come to see? This is it. This is all there is.
Hannah Feustle is a writer and teacher living in Ann Arbor, MI. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Mississippi and an MFA in fiction from the University of Memphis. Her work is forthcoming or published in The Normal School, The South Carolina Review, The Worcester Review, the minnesota review, Bayou Magazine, Chautauqua, and others.