Mr. Splitfoot

These woods are where silence has come to lick its wounds.

Because every story is a ghost story, even mine.

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

Religions need women. Who else would do all the work?

History holds up one side of our lives and fiction the other.

Summer’s ending and the closest thing I’ve had to an adventure was a Google search of Baja California.

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?

We grow up into ghosts. No

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. Here

The first two days without a phone, my insides are jumpy and nauseated, a true withdrawal. My veins ache for information from the Internet, distractions from thought. I’m lonely. My neck, lungs, blood hurt like I’m getting a cold. The world happens without me because I’m exiled with no Wi-Fi. I wonder if my shoes have arrived yet. Maybe Lord is trying to reach me with news of his divorce. 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. I want to buy things without trying them on. I want to look at photos of drunk kids I knew back in high school. And I want it all in my hand. But my cyborg parts have been ripped out. What’s the temperature? I don’t know. What’s the capital of Hawaii? I don’t know anything. I

Ruth does love Jesus, same way she loves Lincoln, Robin Hood, Martin Luther King, and Nat. Handsome men who fight for justice.

he asks me, as if Ruth’s become invisible. That’s fucked up but that’s what happens to women. We grow up into ghosts. No one wants to screw Ruth anymore so she’s invisible.

Oh, I’m real. I’m the story of Sheresa. I write a little bit of the fiction of me every day. You see what I’m talking about? Then once you have the boundaries of history and fiction secure, where does everything else fall? Somewhere in between the two. History holds up one side of our lives and fiction the other. Mother, father. Birth, death, and in between, that’s where you find religion. That’s where you find art, science, engineering. It’s where things get made from belief and memory.

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.

There isn't any point to it. I'm not getting anywhere. No start, middle, or end. The children scream and I scream, and the noise we make goes out and down and round and round and round.

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

Microbes. Bacteria. Worms underground that mingle our parts with everything. It’s generous.” He locks his fingers in hers. “And infinite.” Mr. Bell squares his face to hers. “If you can get over the dreaded finite.

I’m the story of Sheresa. I write a little bit of the fiction of me every day.

I get enraged at the tyranny of text.” “What’s that?” “You know. Left to right. Punctuation. Page 1, page 2, page 3.

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.

He told me Denise likes it rough

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.

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?

So if you want to convince me that there’s something bigger going on here, some sort of grand plan or map or order in the universe, you’re going to have to first explain why God makes bad moms.” Ruth shrugs. “I don’t know why.” “Well, I do and it’s because he doesn’t exist.

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.

This whole time we’ve been walking, I thought we were heading somewhere, but just now, seeing her scared face, I know that we’re also running away.

The clerk says to me, “If you’re pregnant, you shouldn’t eat cold cuts.” Now that my belly shows, I’m public property. Strangers speak to me all the time. They tell me how I should do everything.

What, she wondered, was going to happen to people who think they know everything? What's going to happen without chance?