Mr. Splitfoot

by Samantha Hunt

Her idea of a mother is like a non-dead person’s idea of heaven. It must be great. It must be huge. It must be better than what she’s got now.

When they had mothers, Nat’s read him books and fed him vitamins until a bad man bit off the tip of her right breast and told her he’d be back for the left one. She didn’t stop driving until she reached New York State.

The Mother is a part-time parishioner, part-time wife, part-time drug addict.

When the Father speaks of Jesus, it’s so intimate it embarrasses Ruth, like he’s talking about his penis or a case of hemorrhoids.

“And you went back to her when you got out? You went to live with her? Guess that’s why you never came for me.” El nods. “Where else was I supposed to go? I was eighteen and pregnant.” “Yeah, I guess you were,” Ruth says. “But you haven’t been eighteen for a long time now.”

She couldn’t forgive such carelessness when she’d worked so hard, waded through so much shit, just to stay alive.

The man on the radio is reminding listeners how years ago a 7.0 earthquake struck an island nation because the island had made a pact with the devil. Sequoya’s grandfather, while surprised by this news, believes it because people will believe just about anything.

There’s a thickness to the air like when you bring the palms of your hands toward one another. It’s not magic. It’s just attention and observation.

When I was a girl and it was quiet, I felt an enormous weight, a dentist’s lead blanket across my body. My hands would get heavy, huge, impossible to lift. The world would go soft, metallic, and heavy. That’s kind of what pregnancy feels like. That, plus the best present you ever felt coming.

I can see it disturb the emptiness.

They move with the quiet swiftness of children trained in self-preservation.

Why do the living assume the dead know better than we do? Like they gained some knowledge by dying, but why wouldn’t they just be the same confused people they were before they died?

Millerites,

Jemima Wilkinson,

but you don't have to be dead to haunt. Parents, songs, exes.”

Matthew 6:26: The birds of the air neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, yet Heavenly Father feeds them.

Ruth slipped each child eighty dollars like a visiting grandma paying them off, expunging her guilt only slightly, the oldest girl walking away from the littler ones, as if being born a girl makes her responsible for everyone alive.

The word “bitch” is silent but understood.

Why is he making her feel responsible for him?

Linda Thompson sing, “I hand you my ball and chain.”

What, she wondered, was going to happen to people who think they know everything? What’s going to happen without chance? Good question.

And I’ll mean that being alive matters, even being alive in the smallest, smallest way. And aren’t you lucky to be here.

PLAYMATES INTERNATIONAL it says. The idea of international here demonstrates a lot of hope.

How does she know herself without a mother?

“Motherhood,” she says, “despite being immensely common, remains the greatest mystery, and all the language people use to describe it, kitschy words like ‘comfort’ and ‘loving arms’ and ‘nursing,’ is to convince women to stay put.”

“I’m telling you, it’s not easy. Life and death are not clean, separate functions.”

“Motherhood makes you a dealer in death. No one tells you this beforehand. You will become obsessed with all the ways a person can go because while it might be easy to deal with the fact that you will one day die, it’s not at all easy—totally unacceptable—to deal with the fact that one day your child will die. Do you hear me?”

Before I was pregnant, I thought carrying a baby meant knowing a baby. That’s not true. I don’t know anything about this child. Pregnancy is a locked door in my stomach, all the weight of life and death and still no way to know it. The baby gives me a small kick, taking what’s delicate—lung tissue, tiny see-through fingers, hair fine enough to spin webs—and hardens it into a tough thing, a thing that likes it rough. It’ll grow and I will be the only one who remembers when it was unmarked and delicate as a moth.

Even more likely, nobody’s safe because they don’t even understand what it is that’s making them angry.

When the Wizard of Oz sends Dorothy off to get the witch’s broomstick, he’s sending Dorothy to her death in order to preserve his lie-based life.

“Art isn’t a hawk making lazy circles in the sky. Beauty doesn’t equal art, and it can’t just be the world in a package. It’s got to take the world and mess it up some. Add the artifice as a lens, right?”

“Here’s something crazy to think about: You have two deaths inside your body right now. That’s the only time that ever happens.”

“Hysterical dysphonia.

Kurt Waldheim, Secretary-General of the UN and, sadly, a Nazi.”

Unfortunate though interesting choice, since it could almost convince you that some cosmic truth of our existence slips in no matter how much Sagan and Druyan tried to control it.

We sent ghost stories up into space.”

Ruth looks shiny herself. She smiles. “There are no good guys or bad guys. Not really.”

“I’m just saying, unexplainable things happen even when you don’t believe in them.”

We have a definitive number of steps remaining, a countable number, and then I don’t know what. A bed or a couch. A bathtub. A baby.

from the hollow of his back, as if scratching an itch, Zeke produces the tool of a coward and a cheat. “What?” Mr. Bell greets the gun.

The lake is silent. Pluto continues to exist, and Mr. Bell absorbs all that quiet through his open wound.

The tiny bombs that parents bury under their child’s skin take years to explode.

The deepest lake in the Adirondacks is made by men and full of enough mystery to betray all humankind.

every story is a ghost story, even mine.