Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

I click a link to a house in Budapest where the carpeting cost four hundred seven dollars a square foot. My coworker Monique comes by. I show her the carpeting. “What’s the big deal?” she asks, squeezing the bridge of her nose. Monique settles into her cubicle, sniffling mucus down her throat. “I’m oozing like a slug.” From a blister pack, Monique pops a capsule brewed with such lovely stuff as guaifenesin, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, sodium carboxymethyl, and magnesium stearate. A little something to get the chemical day started.

I compare prices on a couple pair of shoes, break off the corner of a nut-’n’-strawberry-flavored fruit breakfast bar. Overhead a fluorescent flickers. I order the more expensive pair and experience a feeling of euphoria. Having made the correct shoe choice, I now understand the nature of mystery in the universe. I now belong to a tribe of shod people. Waves of enthusiasm and moral righteousness inflate me straight up to heaven.

I click to check the weather. I read some news about Hollywood. The actor we thought was gay is gay, and this warms me, being part of a human crisis, tucked in with the rest of you who also knew he was gay, and Look! We were right. I search for a rice pudding recipe, my favorite. I cultivate a public persona based on my love of rice pudding. The girls in my college dormitory knew me as such, and now the people I work with share the same truth. I no longer wrestle with the challenges of identity. I am the woman who likes rice pudding, who wears fantastic shoes.

At ten I visit the ladies’ room, hoping it will be empty. It’s not. Denise is there. Denise handles life insurance, all the fraud and fun. Denise self-tans. She dabs her lipstick and glares at me. “Cora. Kind of rhymes with whore.” She smiles at herself in the mirror, tossing the brown paper towel with her purple lip impression into the trash before leaving. The door shuts.

“Denise,” I mutter. “Kind of rhymes with fucking twat.”

Back at my computer, I e-mail Kendra in sales: “Denise eats donkey dick.” I e-mail Joe in security: “Just saw Denise Clint stealing toilet paper from the ladies’ room. Again.”

Her boyfriend, Mike the claims inspector, flirts with me. B.F.D. We had lunch once, and he spent the whole time talking about her. He told me Denise likes it rough, as if that were something really special, as if she’s an angel come down from heaven because she likes her heinie paddled. Mike went starry-eyed thinking about slapping her orange thighs. “She likes it rough? Who doesn’t?” I asked. “Who, for Pete’s sake, doesn’t?”

I do a search for my name. Same as yesterday. Some flight attendant who got fired for throwing hot tea on a passenger; the mug shot of a woman arrested for obstructing justice; some teenage Mormon girl’s blog; an adjunct professor of environmental science; then me, insurance adjuster, one-time Daisy girl, one-time honor student, dean’s list, et cetera. I live far from the top of the search engine results. This is my cross to bear.

If I plotted a map of every person named Cora Sykes on planet Earth, what would the map look like? What secret history would be revealed? Maybe better not to know.

I check the headlines. I check the traffic. I check on Lord’s wife, Janine, again. No change, she’s still not dead according to the Internet. I leave for lunch.

Outside a bunch of starlings sit on a wire above the parking lot. I italicize them with my eyes. Copy and paste them right down the phone line. My computer and I spend a lot of time together. Like a dog and its master, I’m starting to look like it, act like it. I ask Google, “Why do I suck?” or “Should I break up with Lord?” I think I can edit/undo things with my mind, say, a cup of spilled coffee or an unintended pregnancy.

Lord is my boyfriend. Weird name, I know. Lord is married to Janine. Lord has romantic delusions about things like girls, hunting, marriage, honor, poetry, the ocean, America, facial hair. He used to be a Marine. Janine, Marine. I could write a poem. He once left a wild turkey on my doorstep, imagining I’d truss it up and serve it to him for dinner. I covered it with a black garbage bag and dragged it out to the curb. Lord grew a mustache to fool me into thinking he’s actually a man. Like a real, real man, as in a human male who takes care of someone besides himself. I am the child of a single mom. I don’t believe in real men. I also don’t believe in the lottery or God. They are stories we tell ourselves at night when we’re scared. I’m not scared of anything anymore. I know no one else is going to take care of me.

Lord’s in my driveway when I get home from work.

“You want to go camping tonight?”

“Is your wife coming?” I regret that I cannot stop myself from asking these types of questions.

He grips the wheel. “You want to go or not?”

I check with the sky. “All right,” I tell him. “All right.”

We drive over to the Finger Lakes. We fill his packs with food, clothes, beers, and start our hike as the sun sets. All the while Lord quizzes me about birdcalls, bird species.

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know, Lord. I just don’t know.”

“Pileated.” His disappointment reeks. “Who doesn’t know the pileated woodpecker? Mercy. Were you raised by wolves?”

I shrug.

“No,” he says. “Even a wolf would know the pileated woodpecker.”

I was raised by Eleanor, my mom. She’s not a wolf, but she was pregnant, homeless, and alone at eighteen, so almost a wolf. She still works at least two jobs. She never trusted babysitters so I raised myself. Maybe I’m the wolf.

We hike a mile. It gets dark. Lord’s wearing a headlight. I follow along behind, stumbling some. I use the screen of my smartphone to see until the battery goes dead. We build a fire in the woods and eat stew dinner from a can with hunks of cheddar cheese melted on top. Then a few bites from a chocolate bar. Lord belches. “‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. O no. It is an ever-fixed—’”

“How’d you learn that?” I’ve got to tamp him down sometimes.

He coughs. Spits. “I read books. Ever heard of ’em?” Lord’s got a hateful streak here in the forest. At home too. But I’m trying to improve myself so I listen to him.

“Some.”

“What’s that mean, computer girl? What kind of books do you read?”

It takes me a second to say it. Not because I don’t know who I am but because Lord throws off a lot of interference. “I like ghost stories.”

“Ghost stories suck.”

“Why?”

“They aren’t real.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” He drinks his beer.

“All stories are ghost stories,” I tell him.

“Is that right?”

“Yup.” He’s making fun of me. I don’t care. “You want to hear one?”

“A ghost story?”

“Yeah.”

“Fine.”

“OK. Ready?”

“Sure.”

“Sure. Here we go.” But then I don’t start yet. I want it quiet, real scary and silent, before I say anything. Let Lord listen to the woods. OK. OK. OK. “You know West Lane, the twisty road that heads out to the highway?”

“Sure.”

“Well, it was dark out there one night. It’s always dark out there, right? Raining. You know. A dark road. Wet road. No one around.” I put plenty of space between each small description. Slowly, slowly. “A man, fella around your age, was driving home on that road, squinting through the raindrops on his windshield when all the sudden there’s a pretty girl standing in the street, eight years old, wearing a summer dress, wrong for the weather. Think she was in my cousin’s class at school, but I don’t remember her name. Maybe you knew her. Anyway, guy slams on the brakes. Right?”