Selah had begun to suspect that maps weren’t for avoiding getting lost.
They were for giving curious people permission to create a future.
Her alarm went off exactly on time.
Sleep, however, had declined the invitation.
Her mind hadn’t stopped wandering until nearly two in the morning.
How that happened was another version of a dating story.
Selah’s friend, Max, was a handsome forty-seven year old who collected impossible things.
Aliens.
Idaho cryptids.
Half-finished theories.
Questions with no intention of becoming answers.
The Sawtooth Shadow.
Not a monster.
A metaphor.
In every chapter, it appeared just outside certainty.
Sometimes as a trail in fresh snow.
Sometimes as a blurry trail-camera photograph.
Sometimes as nothing more than a sound in the trees.
People listened to Max.
Then wondered whether Sawtooth Shadows existed at all.
Max and Selah had a habit of talking about impossible things as though they were overdue for coffee.
“People keep looking for Sasquatch,” he said once, “but nobody’s looking for the things that don’t want to be found.”
Selah wasn’t entirely sure whether he meant cryptids or people.
The distinction mattered less every day.
She had spent the better part of a year trying to disappear from one version of herself.
Somehow she’d become visible to another.
She hadn’t planned on becoming a writer.
She hadn’t planned on becoming a character.
Dating apps had become her field research.
None of it was in the life plan she’d never actually written.
Regardless, Selah and Max’s worlds collided in endless creative possibility, with no discernible proof that anyone’s theories existed outside the conversation.
Max texted:
“Saw another cryptid report.”
Selah sighed.
She rolled her eyes.
She filled the kettle.
Peppermint again.
If tea couldn’t solve existential uncertainty, at least it smelled like it might.
The cat—serendipitously also named Max—jumped onto the counter.
She opened Max’s article. The human Max.
The picture was blurry.
She laughed.
Then—
Ping.
A dating notification.
She closed the cryptid article.
Opened Bumble.
First profile.
Fish.
Second.
Dead elk.
Third.
“Alpha.”
She laughed again.
Swipe.
Swipe.
Swipe.
She snorted into her tea.
Maybe she’d been looking for cryptids in the wrong forests.
It seemed statistically more likely that Selah would discover a new species in Idaho than match with a man who opened with more than, “Hey, sexy,” or who thought to ask a second question.
They almost always ended up calling her “babe.”
She could feel herself losing interest before she finished reading the period.
If there was a period.
Recently, a friend had encouraged the forty-five-year-old version of Selah to enjoy wandering through the dating pool.
“Ooo la la,” he’d said.
As though the entire point of dating could be translated into one breathy phrase.
He insisted that the men Selah met online were simply looking for a sexual adventure.
And as much sex with attractive women as they could find.
How that was different from men in real life and at any age remained an elusive question.
Some variables refused to solve themselves.
Whipper snapper.
Max, that is.
Selah…
She remained cryptid.
Every swipe, every cryptid story, every new and strange conversation became another pencil mark on an emotional map she hadn’t realized she was drawing.
*
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