Daddy's by Lindsay Hunter Read Free Book Online

and then a motherfucker and then a perverted motherfucker, opened the door so hard that it slammed into the wall. He could hear the boy’s boots on the metal steps outside, then as they ran across the parking lot. Only then did he push himself up onto his knees, wipe the carpet bits from his face. The weather report was showing an animation of the tropical storm growing until it covered half the state. The weatherman assured him that it wasn’t a definite, but that he had to be prepared.
     

    He sat on the bed for a while, watching families walk by his open door with towels and snorkels and baggies of sandwiches and cookies, looking in at him and then looking quickly away. He walked to the 7-Eleven on the corner, bought a pint of rocky road and a couple MoonPies. On the way back to the motel the sun was an orange yolk sliding down the sky. He forced himself to look into it, but after a short time had to look away.
     

    Back in his room he thought for a second about hanging himself from the shower rod. Ate both the MoonPies and started on the ice cream, turned on the evening news. Someone had been abducted, a small girl with saucer eyes and messy hair. In the morning he’d drive north, make another state, maybe two. He finished the ice cream in four large spoonfuls. It slid down his throat and iced his heart. He pulled the covers up to his belly, wondered what he could leave of himself behind and all he could do without, thought of how his wife often had lipstick on her teeth, how it made her look like she’d just bitten into something alive, something that bled. At a commercial break he picked up the phone, dialed home, hung up when he heard his daughter’s voice, small and distant, singing Hello, Hello, Are you there?
     

NOTE
     

    I wrote my sister this note about all the things I hate. Gorgons, it said. And how people go nutville any time the moon throws a shape. Nasty ass Nilla Wafers. The smell of crotch, which only seems to come wafting out from my sister’s room. Football players and especially football players who spend time in my sister’s crotch-smelling bedroom. The way the cable box gets all warm so Daddy knows when he puts his hand on it I been watching my shows instead of doing my papers. Cats, but not kittens. Arm hair. Cutting the grass on Sundays ’cause Daddy didn’t have no sons. Thigh chafe. Sun-In. Hair that has Sun-In in it. Hair from my sister’s head and finding clumps of it in the drain or in a tangle breezing around the bathroom floor. Anything orange-flavored. I hate, I said, and then I corrected myself by crossing out hate and writing despise above it, but not crossing it out so much that she couldn’t still see the word hate, I despise shit in other people’s teeth. Namely peppercorns and chewed-up bread products. But then I got specific and said Shit like them threads, them filaments , I said, that get left behind and flutter from between your teeth once you bite into a orange slice and have swallowed down all the juice and loose pulp, because my sister sure did like a good orange slice. The words loose and pulp coming anywhere near each other, come to think of it, I said. And also, the smell coming from the kitchen drain. That spoon that got caught up in the kitchen drain that I keep getting stuck with which is surely mangling up my lips with every bite of store-brand breakfast whatever. Lip chap. People that don’t brush the mung off they tongue. The sound of two tongues meeting somewhere in the middle, like slurp-slap, slap-slurp. Any song by that one guy. Any song that could be described as a song to get kissing to. Any boy that makes any kind of noise loud enough for me to hear as I happen by my sister’s room on my way to none of your business. Any boy says Jesus like anyone else’d say Mark or Dave. Thick lines of dirt in some fingernails. How cologne smells like toothpaste and rubbing alcohol. How Daddy walks around shirtless. How I can’t help but notice the swirls of