CALL OF THE WILD

By Pam Orlovsky

You are home alone, listless on your futon, watching a television program about celebrity appendectomies. Then, suddenly, you hear the call of the wild.

It is a like a primal echo from time immemorial, rousting you as if Mother Nature herself is shaking your soul awake. You forget about the triple-sausage pizza slowly rotating in the microwave. You fling open your front door and race into the night, heeding this mysterious, ineffable supplication.

You are led down the street, past shopping centers and chain restaurants and the rest of the backdrop to your workaday existence. Soon you are at the edge of town. The call of the wild grows deafening now as you approach a gas station near the highway. You walk to the back of the building and there, in the glow of the moon, you find a Yeti, a very soiled and odoriferous Yeti, slumped against a dumpster with an empty jug of mango schnapps clutched to his hirsute chest.

You recognize him as the same vomit-covered Yeti you saw stumbling around outside the plasma donation center last week. What's more, you realize the call of the wild you've been hearing has been the Yeti’s throaty plea for more liquor and fruit-flavored cigarillos, and also some smoked oysters.

You tell the Yeti you have no money. The howling stops abruptly, and the creature tries to rise from his nest of pine straw and hamburger wrappers so he can claw you to shreds and feast on your insides. But that quickly proves too difficult a task.

“Fuck it,” says the Yeti, and falls asleep instead. And you look at this slumbering, defeated beast and wonder if you are gazing into a mirror ― or if you are just looking at a very inebriated Yeti.

(This is cryptozoologist Pam Orlovsky's second work of fiction about Yetis.)