Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

The boys stop their frolic. Ruth’s long brown hair floats on the surface. She waves to me to join her. More panic at the shoreline, arms paddle swiftly, rushed with surprise and embarrassment. The boys sprint to dry land as if pursued by a great white.

If Ruth notices their revulsion, she doesn’t show it.

Spits of “Feh!” as I make my way to the shoreline. I’ve never caused such a reaction. But Ruth’s arms swish, gentle as wings. I borrow her courage. The coolness of the lake, our buoyancy. Underwater I lift my shirt for my messed-up baby without sin.

We float for a long time. Fireflies appear, stars beaming their light all the way from far-off outer space. Ruth is walking me away from the world I know into one I don’t.

We spend a day in a motel waiting out hard rain, watching daytime TV under the covers of a double bed. Ruth wields the remote. We spend the next morning walking through the drizzle to escape the horror of daytime TV.

After lunch the sun comes back out. Ruth smiles. I pinch her rear and shuffle my feet, a boxer in the fresh air. She opens her arms, steps to one side, then the other, some old Latin dance move. Ruth can still dance. She laughs. It’s not talking, but it’s sound coming out of her. She kicks some pebbles in our path. In one hour I’ll forget what her laugh sounded like, but right now I play it on rewind over and over again.

I don’t know anything. Lord’s wife might be dead. Nuclear bombs might have destroyed New York City. It could be Tuesday, the day I go to the gym after work. I don’t know when the equinox will come or if it already came. I don’t know a thing about the bones in my feet. I don’t even really know skin. Parts of my feet resemble corned beef hash, a mash of chunky pulp smelling just as foul. Blisters lanced and drained, swollen ankles.

We fall asleep like corpses, end of the film, but Ruth really is a horror movie villain. You think she’s dead, done, conquered. The audience, including me, breathes easy for a moment. Phew. I can go home now, have a snack, take a bath, but then Ruth bolts upright, her head rigid, ready to walk again. Unkillable. Unstoppable. Undead all over again. It’s alive. It’s alive.

“Where are we heading?”

She points down the road, someplace I can’t see, but each morning I say to myself, Today we’ll arrive. We have to. We’ve been walking so long. And each night we don’t. “Where?” I yell at her, dedicated drama queen. “Talk to me!”

I smell burning plastic and Chinese food. We walk past the entrance to a Walmart. “Can we go in?” It’s not home, but it’s familiar. Ruth rolls her eyes but allows the excursion.

Across the huge expanse of parking lot, the magic doors sense our presence. An empty cube of frigid air escapes as we enter. We are greeted by an older woman in a smock. HELLO, her badge says, I’M RITA. “Can I help you find something?” Rita, full of welcome, smiles at filthy, undeserving me, aware that most likely we’ll buy absolutely nothing. We might even leave some grease behind or shoplift. Rita keeps on smiling. People do that near Ruth’s scar, like kissing the ring of an evil queen or keeping a mad dog calm. “No thanks. Come on.” I lead Ruth first through the accessory division. Here, I am the guide. Watches, wallets, and leather driving gloves bleed into a scented bounty, rows of body lotions, bubble baths, multivitamins, and cream rinses. I move slowly through these items. The jewel-toned surplus reaches up to the ceiling. People select their identity from hundreds of shampoos, supplements, and suppositories. Dove + Garnier Fructis + Finesse + Crest + Secret. We head into homewares. Shams and sheets. I stop to feel a comforter, testing its thickness. I relax in the linen department. Ruth and I test a model bed, resting in the calm pleasure of things. We wash up in Walmart’s bathroom. I let the warm water rush over my hands, wrists, elbows. Ruth scrubs her hairy pits. No one cares.

I find a pair of jeans with a flexible panel. I need these. But I also want to buy something I don’t need for the luxury of spending money. After trips through sporting goods, craft supplies, stationery, and lingerie, I choose a bracket of wooden beads. Looks like an abacus. Supposed to be used as a foot massager. Ruth shrugs. “I’ll carry it.” She selects a blue tarp. The tarp worries me.

“What’s that for?”

Ruth doesn’t answer.

“To sleep on?”

She nods back at me while she’s walking away and winds up banging straight into an older man neither of us saw.

“Well, look at you,” the man says to Ruth, smiling, standing from a crouch. He’d been comparing a couple of empty plastic storage containers, huge Tupperware. “How’s it going for you?” he asks Ruth.

She nods, doesn’t answer him, of course.

“I see,” he says. “Cat got your tongue. Yup. That happens sometimes.” But he’s indifferent to her silence, keeps right on talking. “How are you finding the canal?”

“What?” I step in.

“The Erie,” he says. “That’s why you’re here, right? I love it but find it requires something a bit more waterproof.” He gestures toward the plastic containers, looks at Ruth. “You need one of these?” he asks her.

She crouches to examine the containers better. Pats the plastic lid of one, then shakes her head no.

She moves into the shoe department.

“How much farther is it, Ruth?” She chooses new sneakers for me, so there’s my answer. Ruth doesn’t need replacement shoes yet, a further embarrassment of pregnancy.

Along this strip mall street, a forgotten, unclaimed house remains. A family that held out against the inevitable and was surrounded before they could sell out. Target, Home Depot, Barnes & Noble, Jo-Ann Fabric, Stop & Shop, Staples, and their family home. A real estate sign large as a living room advertises the parcel. The house is white. Honeysuckle unhitches its jaw over the front porch. In a car it would be easy to miss. On foot it is impossible. Ruth jerks her chin toward the house.

My bag is heavier, rubbing a new spot raw on my shoulder. I already regret the stupid wooden beads.

Inside, the noise from the road is buffered a bit. It looks like someone’s still living here, someone who hates to dust. Every surface is coated with greasy grit from vehicle emissions, but besides the dust, there’s little sign that the humans ever moved out. The kitchen table is still draped with a cherry-printed tablecloth. There are some drippy brown spots on the fabric. There’s a bowl, a glass, and spoon in the sink as if someone ate breakfast and disappeared. The Rapture happened after orange juice. Or like the way I left home without telling my mom I was going.

I don’t dare look in the refrigerator.

On one wall there’s a collection of phone numbers scrawled in lead, four digits each. The phone has a rotary dial. I lift the receiver. Nothing.

“You want to stay here tonight?”

Ruth nods. She fingers a kitchen counter covered with forget-me-not contact paper as if it’s human.

“Cool.”

There’s a couch in the living room. On a low coffee table, there’s an old TV Guide with Loni Anderson on the cover. Her hair preserved forever. Beside it there’s a handwritten note. “Ezra, Don’t forget to water my damn ficus.—P.” The TV is gone. The ficus is dead. What happened to Ezra and P.?

Ruth runs out to the gas station mini-mart for some bottled water, potato chips, and sandwiches that we unseal from triangular wedges of packaging. I rest my feet on the coffee table the way P. & Ezra probably did before. Without electricity I watch the lights of the cars pass by. The traffic never stops, waves on an eroding beach, creeping closer to the house each night, eating the quiet fields, the neighbors, stars in the night sky.