Mr. Splitfoot

by Samantha Hunt

I no longer wrestle with the challenges of identity. I am the woman who likes rice pudding, who wears fantastic shoes.

“All stories are ghost stories,”

For people my age, including me, if we don’t post it, it never happened.

What is the scariest thing that can happen? A child can disappear without a trace. A man could follow you at night. Someone could hide behind your bedroom door. There is a small throw rug in the room. There is a wooden chair by the darkening window. There is someone hiding behind my bedroom door.

When Scout finds Boo Radley hiding behind her bedroom door, she says something that is scary because it is calm. Something like, “Why, there’s the man right there, Mr. Tate.” Or whatever his name is. Scout’s not surprised to find a hollow-eyed monster in the form of Robert Duvall behind her door. She opens a line into magic, possibility. Or mystery, that’s a better word than magic. Like an open hole in the ground no one noticed until Scout pointed it out, a place where men with dark secrets live behind every bedroom door. Scout’s calm voice says, “The rest of you are blind.”

I love this To Kill A Mockingbird reference

“Heaven is a dream of Disneyland for those unable to act here on Earth.”

“Like likes like.”

There’s a courageous way of living I want my own baby to know about.

Ruth drops the phone onto the pavement. It lands with a celebratory smack. That’s how that world slips away.

The world happens without me because I’m exiled with no Wi-Fi.

I have a parade of grotesque urges. I want to push little buttons quickly. I want information immediately. I want to post pictures of Ruth and me smiling into the sun. I want people to like me, like me, like me.

People select their identity from hundreds of shampoos, supplements, and suppositories.

But I also want to buy something I don’t need for the luxury of spending money.

Every tree we see reminds me of El. There’s sacrifice, antagonism, rebellion, obsession, and adoration, but no properly complex word for what’s between a mother and a daughter, roots so twisted, a relationship so deep, people suffocated it in kitsch and comfort words to pretend it’s easy. I look to the trees. I hold my stomach tightly but I'm not strong enough to stop mothers and daughters from splitting apart.

I’M SMARTER NOW that my smartphone is gone. I can pay attention in a different way.

Now that my belly shows, I’m public property. Strangers speak to me all the time. They tell me how I should do everything. They want to know, boy or girl? What will I call it? Cloth or disposable diapers? Breast or bottle? Women either tell me that pregnancy hurts or that it is a miracle. Old men say some variation of “Whoa! Whoa! I’ll boil the water and get some sheets.”

Nothing stranger than pregnancy could happen to a body. Not drugs, not sex. An unknown that gets bigger every day. An unknown I feel stirring, growing, making me do things my body doesn’t normally do. A program set to play. One day it will talk to me. It will die. How’s that possible?

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?

For her, Mr. Splitfoot is a two that is sometimes a one, mothers and their children, Nat and Ruth, life and death.

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

“I respect your intelligence too much to construct a narrative that might convince you of a reality far from the truth.”

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.

Ceph’s wearing a pair of dark sunglasses and a brown leather jacket. He’s carrying a cane.

“I am following you. I’ve got nowhere else. I’m going to follow you wherever you go. Wherever.”

I would think a person who doesn’t know what’s she’s running from can’t really be on the run, but that’s not true.

We grow up into ghosts.

Hear it now or lose that beauty forever.

Millions of stars overhead make the violence of the Big Bang clear. So much force that matter is still sprinting away from the center.

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

Some ancient program is switching on in my hormonal body saying winter is nearer than it was yesterday. Take shelter. Wolves, coyotes, and bears will become hungry, and a child, to them, will taste so sweet.

How does she know herself without a mother? How does she know herself without sound? I guess she knows the shape of things that aren’t there instead.

“Maybe she’s hardening you up into the warrior you’d better be before that baby arrives.”

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.

It’s where a thing can’t be beautiful or perfect without an imperfection.

Wabi-sabi

Perfection scribbled out or the imperfection that makes you, me, anyone perfect and complete because it includes the truth of our mortality.

My belly’s more bomb than baby. I’m splitting in two. One way or another it’s going to tear me up.

You have two deaths inside your body right now. That’s the only time that ever happens.”

“NASA sent up two satellites in ’77, and on board both they packed golden records in case the satellite should ever encounter someone who might want to listen.”

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. Waldheim’s dead now. Lots of the people on this record are dead now. We sent ghost stories up into space.”

Raindrops, thunder, crickets and monkeys, footsteps, heartbeats, birdsong, trains. There’s the sound of a mother kissing her child, saying, “Be a good boy,” and all manner of songs: classical, drums, bagpipes, yelling, Pygmy girls chanting, Chuck Berry. The vinyl pops. The songs pile up. It keeps snowing. Mr. Bell announces each new track. Russian, Bulgarian, pan pipes, Mexican, Azerbaijani. Stravinsky. One song, just a man with a guitar. The man hums and moans. “Blind Willie Johnson. ‘Dark Was the Night.’”

All the sounds recorded in the Golden Record that was sent to space during the Voyager '77 mission.

“Humans are so good at imagining things, they invent gods who feel so real, they then betray us by not existing.”

there’s nothing scary about dead people. It is the living who terrify.