Liz Steale
Everyone wants to be a cryptid, but no one wants to do the work.
I have been digging around in trash cans all my life, bounding blurry between the trees in front of photographs so as to become blurry whenever someone has set up a camera to catch me. Do you know how much pain it takes to hold yourself apart, the atoms shaking so that single photograph looks like an amateur attempt at capturing a race car going by? All blur, no car. It’s a relief when I can scramble back to my hole with an ice cream wrapper to lick, sink down and search stereo static in hopes that someone is playing Love with Arthur Lee. A slight sleep, a nap, and then someone needs to see something that might be an alien so off again to scramble, take off the person pajamas and put on the paint-peel of green or grey skin. Sometimes the map or the call is wrong and I end up in tornado disguise like a Jersey Devil when it was a Mothman request. To be a cryptid one must be almost catchable and never quite – every day a new child finds their first long overlooked book of Time-Life mysteries of the unknown.
Stay on call. Every time someone sees something unexplained. The pay— bad, the travel— wide ranging, and the loneliness— sublimity. Every cryptid contracts out alone.
For a moment, when you are standing on top of a hill about to run run down into the city and astound everyone with just what you don’t quite look like, you see yourself from above, a frame outside, looking like the Caspar Freidrich scene. Pretend to be almost human again, and dive back into the outer range of human sight. Dive, cryptid, dive! Dive like submarine.
Liz Steale is the nom-de-création of a poet, writer, and musician who lives under the incandescent glow of Las Vegas lights. Fae have abandoned, without apology, a career in teaching in order to write and create full time.
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TRASH CAT LIT 