My girl, Rosalia, she screams outside, she runs in, she shouts, I seen it, I seen the Bigfoot. Hands over her mouth like terror. Ain't a thing to be seen, this sasquatch. And, like all them other times, she says, won't you go track it for me? Won't you go and trap the beast? And, she gets those eyes that'd launch them thousand ships and I'm useless against it.


Rosalia unbuttons her blouse like invitation, she brushes her bare, sweet toes over the top of her other foot, she bites down on her lip till that pink goes white. What will you do for me? She asks. Will you protect me with all your wild?

How my girl got me through those hundreds of days inside, how she kept me from tying a noose of my sheets, how those bars seemed less cold with her on the outside. How I woulda killed a man for her whirlwind love.

And I ain't the first prison rat she's loved and I won't be the last. Inside, when she visited, she asked what I'd do to that man or that one if he tried to get at me, tried to take me with his ravenousness.

Her letters asked for pictures of fight-blackened eyes and blood and stitches criss-crossed in lips and above eyebrows.


If you ain't careful and watchful, my girl says with wanting, the Bigfoot'll put out this special food, this ghost food, this food that will look so good you can't help but eat it. And, you'll eat that food, you will, and that's when you start to turn, that ghost food changing you, making you into this beast, this brute.

I say I ain't gonna change, ain't gonna turn into some wicked. Her foot brushes the carpet. A hand lingers over a half-unhooked button.

And I think how she wants that sun-leathered skin, those rock muscles of a beast running forever through them woods. She want the hunt, the blood. When she bares her skin for me, she bares it for the bite, not for soft language of love.

How all her tenderness, all her touch has lessened since I got out.


Out there ain't a thing but the sticky-sweat of the air and mosquitoes drinking up blood and all the noise and rush of the cities beyond the woods. Rosalia knows it and been knowing it and still it don't matter and still she wants it. And sometimes how I think late at night about what if I hurt another man, a stranger, and got back inside those bars, and what old, skin-hungry Rosalia might return.

She stands there, saying, go go, and what I wouldn't do.

And I pull her flush against my body and kiss her like it's the last. I turn and go out and Rosalia is standing at the door, shirt unbuttoned, when I turn to see her. And how if I find that ghost food, how I will take it up and eat of it all and will transform into some wild-running animal. I'll return to Rosalia with all my hair covered in dirt and and brush. I will drag my sharpened teeth over her skin and she will beg me to take her. I will go out, changed, and take and take until all the world is my own.