Barrett read all night, until the sun came up. It was a familiar feeling to him. He often allowed the nights to drone on, buzzing silently around him, until the orange light broke. It wasn’t something most people paid attention to, he thought. Drunks stay up all night, of course, or people on drugs, but it isn’t the same. There’s an activity, a bustle for them. Social and chemical. Even when he was younger he could drink until the sun came up, but it wasn’t the same as being mostly sober and alone and feeling that pang of shame in your throat when the sun broke. Barrett read somewhere that staying up all night was a sign of intelligence, but Barrett thought that that was just probably written by a guy who stayed up all night a lot.

He powered down the computer when confronted by the morning sun. Going to sleep wasn’t really something he wanted. It felted like a forced resignation. Barrett sighed.

“One trip outside,” he mumbled to himself, and began to put on his left shoe. They said he could take the boot off only when he slept, but he never really did.

The air outside was crisp and cool. Taking the few small steps onto the unvarnished oak stairs was a bit more challenging with one foot covered in plastic armor. The humidity was intense. The air was wet but there wasn’t any liquid. Barrett lurched his way toward the trees in front of the cliff. The spot where he saw Bigfoot and fell.

“I know what I saw,” Barrett said.

Barrett used his big boot to kick a path into the loose, wiry brush at the base of the trees. A myriad of small plants and dead weeds growing into and over each other’s corpses year after year, just starting to bud green. He stepped over what he could to get closer to the cliff just a few feet away.

He had never got this close before. He didn’t like it. To most, it was a spectacular view. Objectively, it was. It oversaw the whole city of Armin, the bridge leading there, the Missouri river. At night, it would have been breathtaking. Barrett liked having the buffer of trees. His house was obfuscated from the view of any of those on Main Street in Armin below.

Barrett got to the edge and stared straight down. Mud, dead trees, and a few pools of stagnant water, waiting for a rainfall so they could be swept into the river. Nothing but floodplains between him and the river. Occasionally, a church with a short memory would try to turn them into a soccer field. He stared back at his feet and to the left, scanning for the creature he saw.

He had read hints on what to look for online.