"You could be something if you tried. Anything. You could be a horse," my father says, and even though I'm not so young anymore I believe him. I do a five-mile run on all fours and bruise my hands. I eat from a trough. I pretend I am large and could trample someone.

My father and I have always been playing this game. Neither of us can win. The game goes like this: My father lies and I agree. When I was five, he used to say: "You were born Irish, all ginger hair and freckles; you had a penchant for corned beef," even though I have always been so black my skin looks purple. When I started high school, it became, "I saw Bigfoot once, eating at a truck stop in Chicago." His favorite one, which he has been repeating to me ever since we became a family of two: "Your mother was a great woman." I always knew he was lying but I always believed him, because it was easier, and I was exhausted. So I would say, looking into the bathroom mirror, "I think I see a freckle." And I would say it in Gaelic. And my father would smile, all crinkly, like he was a balloon that had lost its air a long time ago.

Maybe I'm playing the game with you now. I've already lied once: I didn't believe my father when he said I was a horse, not all the way. I wanted to. But I had grown enough to also want different things—to speak without a brogue, for example.

Actually, I lied twice. I'm sorry. Maybe I'm more like my father than I think. The way to win the game is to not play it. I have always known this. I have always known that Bigfoot is really just a large, confused man running through the woods outside Chicago. That a black woman with green eyes and red hair is just a black woman with green eyes and red hair, and she is, always, walking away from you. When my father says, "You could be a horse," he is in the hospital. It happens a few days after he turns sixty-two. The years of lifting post-office boxes; of sucking on Marlboros; of waiting for a woman so pale and redboned you might mistake her for Irish to reappear, like Bigfoot at a truck stop—these years have carved him out.

Days pass. I don't go back to show my father the bruises I pressed into my palm when I trotted on all fours. I want to, but I don't. Instead I bandage up my hands and send Papa a post-office box with yellowing family photos—photos of just him and me. Here, the one of him scraping my wiry, Brillo pad hair into two puffy braids. There, our first trip to Chicago. We are eating buttermilk pancakes at a diner and not talking about Bigfoot—we are not talking at all.


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Maya Chesley is a Fulbright ETA scholarship recipient. She's working toward an MFA at Johns Hopkins.

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