Daddy's

“Each tiny, diamond story—precise, comic, poised at the edge of surreal—contains one brutal life force tearing itself off the page. You can hold
Daddy’s
in your hands and feel it breathing.”

—
Deb Olin Unferth
, author of
Vacation

“Lindsay Hunter won’t be caught lie-telling in the name of nice. The miniature stories in Daddy’s are fierce and unapologetic. When the We’s she voices say the axblade was bloody with dirt, what they mean is the neighbor’s swingset creaked and moaned next door and we heard a child’s voice say Never ever. When I’m looking again for my next undoing, I’ll crack open Daddy’s, and get the true news they tell us we’d be better off not hearing.”

—
Kyle Minor
, author of
In the Devil’s Territory

for the city of ocoee, fl, from the years 1986 to 1996 with love to my family and ben

MY BROTHER

My brother tells me monsters set up shop in his closet among his Reeboks and hidden
Playboys
. Yeah, he says, leaning back and stroking his chin, yeah, you can’t see it but something’s coming for me. Big whoop, I tell him. We drag his record player out and aim the needle at the middle of “Rocket Man.” He makes something up. He says, I got two sisters and they’re both girls. He says, I’m bored to death with all these nightmares. He says, I’m pretty sure Dad’s a pussy.

My brother went to jail a couple times. My sister and I told people, God don’t take revenge. We said, We accuse the world of pretending at the sky. To each other we said, Our brother is in jail. We pressed numbers into phones and hoped for an answer. I got one once and it was, Your brother is a baby giant stupid in a cage. My sister got one and it was, There’s a light around your brother and it’s an ugly shade; pray for something.

My brother called collect and then sat around. He said, You know what I been thinking? I been thinking a lot about
Jeopardy!
and driveways and sex. He said, I been having sex with the wrong people. He said, Remember how the driveway tilted up and the house looked like a red idiot at the top. He said, I’ll take amnesia for four hundred, Alex.

My brother held the phone up to his ear and pretended it was a horn. My dad watched him on the TV screen. My brother said, Wilma? and my dad got irritated. My brother tried to put on a good show. Dad, he said, I just don’t know what’s wrong with me. Behind him a row of tubas blasted a note and he gestured at them. He said, I got this kind of chorus behind me. He said, They never shut up. He said, I can’t stay on too long I got some soap to drop. He said, I need a drink of something too strong and my dad nodded like a man hanged.

My brother digs a hole and buries most of my dad in it. He says, If we talk nice to it it’ll sprout roses. The record player plays our favorite song. It says, That’s whiskey in your veins and blood on the moon. It says, There’ll never be another night like this. My brother hands me the shovel and says, King me.

SCALES

My brother is a fish, I tell Yesenia.

We’re sitting by her pool. Yesenia is wearing a black bikini and when she stretches I can see her pubic hair. I’m wearing jeans and a sweater. Her weight barely makes a dent in the pool chair; I’m so heavy that if I move slightly I can feel the concrete deck under my ass. We’re tanning under the gray sky, smoking the last of the pot we found in her sister’s sock drawer. Every few minutes I think I hear thunder, or a garbage truck.

Yeah, she says. Wait, a
fish
? Then, holding her breath, she says, You’re high.

Right now, I hate her. The way she smokes like she’s not really smoking, like she’s just mimicking something she saw in a movie, squinting her eyes and laughing like she would if she was dying of laughter—
huc huc huc huc
. But I press on.

It’s not like he has gills or anything, I tell her. But he’s been staring a lot, and sometimes when he’s really deep in thought his mouth opens and closes, like he’s gasping for air, and his feet are really flat and wide, like flippers.

You mind if I cash this? she asks, holding up the joint, and then cashes it. You love your brother, she says.

I want to tell her something that would shock her—something like, I had a dream I was licking your dad’s hairy chest, or, The lightning in your eyes looks like cinnamon floss, or, You’re ugly. Something to make her listen. Something to make her see me differently. But I just say, Yeah, I love him.

Let’s go inside, she says. I’m freezing. My nipples are like little rocks—
huc, huc, huc
. Plus, she says, winding a towel around her dry hair, we can weigh ourselves on my mom’s new scale. It’s digital.

My heart sinks. I’d rather not, I tell her. I had a breakfast burrito and I don’t think it’s digested yet.

Whatever, she says, walking away, her bottoms creeping into her asscrack. Then she wheels on me. You think I care? she hisses. Her hip is cocked; her towel is so tight it makes her eyes turn up. She doesn’t elaborate.

No, I tell her. I don’t think that at all.

I follow her in. Thunder. Definitely thunder.

In her mother’s bathroom, Yesenia stands naked on the scale, her bikini crumpled in the sink. I make a point of looking anywhere but at the scale. I concentrate on a picture of Yesenia’s mom and stepdad standing in a combed white desert, smiling and sunburned.

I hear her dismount the scale, then mount it again.
Godfuckingdammit
, she whispers. I stare so hard at the picture that their heads come alive, floating out from the frame, circling each other. They get so close I notice what looks like a peppercorn in Yesenia’s stepdad’s teeth.

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