Mr. Splitfoot Read Online Free PDF

into my chest, toggling between my boobs.
    “You weren’t scared?”
    Lord walks away from our campsite as if he’s going to take a pee. I shout into the woods. “It’s not real?” But Lord doesn’t answer and then Lord doesn’t come back, so I think it’s something a little more involved than pee, but he still doesn’t come back. A really, really long time passes, so I know what he’s trying to do. He wants me to think the bogeyman got him, think I’m all alone in the woods with a psycho on the loose.
    I’m not going to let him do that to me. I put away the dinner dishes, strum his guitar, and later when I can’t think of anything else, I just sit there by the fire perfectly still with a fucked-up-looking clown smile on my face. I’m good at that. Lord’s too big a jerk to scare me. Orange light flickers on the underside of the tree branches. I think about the little girl who can’t stop coming back. I wonder what would make her come back. Love for her mother? Anger at the driver who killed her? Why keep coming back? Why not just stay dead?
    Lord doesn’t explain anything when he returns. We do it like wild beasts for an hour right there in the dirt, like I’m the innocent little girl and he’s the big bad man with the car come to run me down.
    Afterward he asks, “Do you want to shoot the gun?”
    “Sure.” I’m still naked except for my hiking boots. The kick of his gun throws me three feet back. He thinks that’s the funniest thing ever. Lord opens more beers. I rub my arm. My shoulder will be bruised yellow for days.
    “Janine was nineteen when I met her.”
    His wife. Every freaking time the man comes, he starts feeling guilty. Every freaking orgasm.
    “She was giving haircuts at a house party. Had no idea what she was doing, but the men lined up. Hatchet jobs. Including mine. Janine’s so beautiful, like a model almost. I’d let her do anything. She’s just so beautiful.”
    He means: She is; you’re not. I want to tell him that she’s just normal-looking, nothing too special, but I’ve never met her and I don’t want him to know I stalk her on the Internet. He already thinks he’s better than me because he doesn’t use the Internet.
    “We fell in love in a bloody way, thorns and hooks.”
    Lord’s wiry and strong. “You must have been something at nineteen.” I hope that hurts. Lord’s old now. Forty-five, at least.
    “Yeah. We got hitched and tangled together.”
    This never stops him from sleeping with me.
    “Well,” I say. “I can’t wait to meet her!”
    He keeps a hand on his mustache. “We’d been married a year when she started screaming about men from the K.C.G. controlling people with solar panels and jet trails.”
    “What’s the K.C.G.?”
    “Kancer Containment Guard. Usually they’re harmless old men, bumbling and sweet, but sometimes they’re evil. They fill juice boxes with strychnine.”
    Lord looks at me, disappointed again. I put my clothes on. He makes me miss my faithful computer.
    “I believed every word she said. I’d even make stuff up myself to confirm it for her. Wall vents, I’d tell her. Suspicious-looking cars. I created bullshit evidence. But then Janine told me my sister Emilia was the head of the K.C.G. and that we needed to kill her.” Lord looks at me sideways. “You know my sister?”
    I’ve never met his family.
    “Emilia has spina bifida. She was twelve when Janine said that.” Lord reaches for another branch for the fire. He pauses for drama. He does that a lot. “I kept Janine home until she brought scissors to bed and tried to use them on my neck. ‘I’m cutting your hair!’ That’s what she was screaming.” Lord wraps both hands around his neck, choking himself. “She’s in the mental ward of the VA. Take your pill, watch TV, and sometime this afternoon an orderly will change your diaper.”
    No wonder the Internet doesn’t have much to say about her. She’s in the loony bin. Lord’s wife is locked up like all