THE OHIO GRASSMAN GOES TO COSTCO

The Ohio Grassman is having a bit of an identity crisis. Not in the clinical sense—he’s regularly attending therapy and practicing his active listening skills. In the mornings he whispers his mantras into the river moss and carves his happy thoughts into ridges of hickory bark. The Ohio Grassman loves all 800-pounds of himself, from each pigeon-toed foot to hairy forehead pore. In Perry County, he is meant to be a legend—a sasquatch, a bigfoot, a yeti, a monster, a skunk ape, a sneaking, hulking shadow of allure that goes bump in the night. He sees himself as a rarity of nature, something fleeting yet fascinating, anomalous yet sought-after.

But therein lies his problem. He cannot be found if nobody is searching for him.

Over time his name had flickered like a spent match, and the acreage in Minerva, Ohio got paved to make way for a Dollar General. Foliage became flat became scaffolding became strip mall, and suddenly there was no room left for him. He needs a fresh start—a large, maze-like place for a cryptid to both hide and be found, where people search aimlessly for things strange and unexplained. Where people look without looking.

He is going to Costco.

The Ohio Grassman stumbles down I-71 South until he sees a Sheetz cresting an offramp. He is having no luck hitchhiking, and the long walk has been equal parts disheartening and appetite-inducing. A tired-eyed supervisor punches in his order of fried pickle chips, and The Ohio Grassman idles in the snack aisle to ignore their contagious indifference. The snacks are packed like a honeycomb, all clearly visible in a way that is both exciting and repulsive. Among them, there’s a bag of beef jerky with a sasquatch mascot. It isn’t The Ohio Grassman—he was never the type of Bigfoot to have a brand deal.

As he searches, more and more monster-marketing catches his eye. Walls of energy drinks and Blue Bunny ice cream flavors and bedside pills that promise a boner that can pierce sheet metal. He wonders if this is what it means to be a monster in the modern era—not to hide away from the world, but to exist everywhere and nowhere at once in a pleasant, plastic coating.

The Ohio Grassman is charged $3.89 for the pickles, but as he is a large Midwestern ape with no stable income, he does not pay. The supervisor does not stop him. They don’t even look his way.

After ten days of sustaining himself on turkeyfoot grass and assorted roller food, The Ohio Grassman lands at his Plymouth Rock. The Costco is a foursquare shoebox the size of a small city with off-white rectangular walls and a rectangle parking lot full of rectangular spaces. The brutalist fifth-grade geometric sensibilities of the building inspire a feeling of unease and latent potential that The Ohio Grassman finds compelling. He sees himself swinging from the cubic scaffolding in the night—disappearing behind the infinite corridors of sharp, boxy corners when someone catches a peripheral glimpse. He makes his way to the un-shuttered main gate in a stumbling herd of customers, and for a moment, he feels no different than them.

A human interacts with The Ohio Grassman at the entrance, but only because he is not a member, and non-members are the enemy of the warehouse. He is lined up in front of a camera, but since he is ten-feet tall, the photo is stomach-level, and The Ohio Grassman has love handles leftover from hibernation. He is comfortable with his body shape, but of all the photos that could have been taken of him, he is concerned the first is nothing but shape—a stack of lipids. A forest of unidentifiable self.

The Ohio Grassman explores the retail aisles slowly, his ankles often clipped by the wheels of shopping carts on their way to the food court. He tries hiding himself in a mound of 40-pound flour bags, but the stack is picked clean, and he is uncovered. He leaps from behind displays to intimidate families, but the parents welcome the idea of death-by-ape, and the children bite and climb his leg hairs. He is denied entry to staff-only areas. He is asked to stop climbing on the pallets, as it is standard store policy. He is given a free sample of quinoa and kale, but it is the last of the batch, and it has grown lukewarm and wormy.

The Ohio Grassman sits on a little red bench, holding a footlong hotdog in a paper boat and feeling completely defeated. The bone-colored fluorescence in the rafters has become dizzying. The ceilings grow taller by the second, and the entire store smells like corn water and body odor. Nobody has snapped a picture of him—nobody has shrieked or gasped or whispered his name in rumor across the checkout lanes. He does not feel like a monster.

The world had changed in a terrifying way while he was in the woods.

A man wearing pajama pants asks The Ohio Grassman to get off the bench if he’s finished using it. The Ohio Grassman complies. The man does not thank him.

The Ohio Grassman finds a price gun in the hardware aisle. He aims it between his eyes and staples a label to his forehead. He is now $69.99 plus tax. He wanders to the lawn decoration displays and crashes on a sea-green outdoor couch, completely buckling the seat cushions and cracking the armrest under his thirty-pound heel. He waits there for some time. Customers parade around him at all angles, and on occasion one meets his gaze as they browse toward the outdoor grills. It is a different type of attention than he is accustomed to, but The Ohio Grassman knows he will grow used to it. Adapting is a part of nature after all, and just because something is hard to find doesn’t mean it’s being searched for.