Free Bigfoot Dreams by Francine Prose

world like some medieval monk: As it is on earth, so it is in heaven. Everything is a sign of something else, something usually pretty awful. It’s a trap set for her at tricky turns in the road, like when Lowell first left and she saw every raindrop as a sign that the babysitter was letting Rosalie drown.
    Vera remembers a story about Kafka. He and Gustav Janouch are out walking. Suddenly Kafka stops and says, “Look. There, there. Can you see it?”
    “A pretty little dog,” says Janouch.
    “A dog?” asks Kafka.
    “A small young dog. Didn’t you see it?”
    “I saw it. But was it a dog?”
    “It was a little poodle.”
    “A poodle?” says Kafka. “It could be a dog, but it could also be a sign. We Jews often make tragic mistakes.”
    Vera almost wishes the story ended there, and yet she likes knowing Janouch’s reply, likes hearing that cocky young poet with Kafka for a friend and his whole life ahead of him answer, “No, it was only a dog.” It seems important to remember this now and bear in mind that the two guys nearly rolling their rack of dresses into her aren’t a sign of destiny seeking new ways to mow her down. The fire-sale store, its window full of lace tablecloths, fake Chinese rugs, and tusks carved into leaning-tower-of-Pisa pagodas isn’t a symbol of spiritual bankruptcy. Nor does the old man selling hot dogs to harried commuters mean that humans are just so much meat on the bone.
    Vera’s almost convinced herself when she walks down the subway steps and notices the wall behind the ticket booth covered with signs. Why hadn’t she noticed them before? Bright-colored enameled placards with pictographs aimed at illiterates and foreign tourists. The smoking cigarette behind the diagonal slash, the crossed-out radio. The schnauzer bisected by another diagonal line, and beside it the blind man with his Seeing Eye dog and no line. A dog, thinks Vera. A sign.
    And finally, a joke. By tomorrow, some kid will have drawn a penis on the Seeing Eye dog, two balls on the cigarette; in six months, the Transit Authority will take down the signs. When she was in high school, the most common subway graffiti was LAMF. Who now knows it meant Latin American Motherfucker? People talk about archeologists excavating New York and wondering at the uses of things, but it won’t take that long for most things to lose their meanings.
    We Jews often make tragic mistakes. Vera knows hers is not realizing: when you’re looking for signs, you see them. But how to stop? Just trying reminds her of a story she heard about some alchemists who believed that the secret of making gold was going through the process without once thinking of the word hippopotamus.
    The train pulls in, and Vera sits down across from a fat kid with a giant hippopotamus grinning at her from his T-shirt. She thinks HUNGRY HIPPO CHEWS CHICAGO CHILD, then stops herself; such thinking is her version of waving a cross at Dracula.
    Lowell was a great believer in synchronicity, a tireless collector of meaningful coincidence; he’d mention some cousin he hadn’t seen in years and the cousin would call up. His attitude toward it was not unlike Mavis’s: those little runs outside the laws of probability seemed to cheer him. Easy for him, Vera thought. His terrors went only as far back as the Baptists, while hers had had three thousand years in the desert to cook. It wasn’t that she feared synchronicity, but that she’d rather not be the beneficiary of all that unwanted attention from the beyond. Who knew but that those little casual clusters might at any moment turn out to be black holes? This too must be part of her DNA code. Why else should she feel this way? Until today she’s never seen anyone harmed by peculiar coincidence except perhaps Louise. And ultimately it’s hard to say what hurt Louise.
    A few weeks before Rosie was born, Louise came to New York and asked Vera to meet her at the Museum of Natural History cafeteria, where, over lukewarm