Free Make Something Up by Chuck Palahniuk Page B

that happy who wasn’t pretending. On the computer screen, the man bent his knees deeper, thrusting his backside against the bucking hips of the stallion. Something dark, a shadow or blood, ran down his leg.
    Randall hit Enter and the adventure began, anew. This time he watched the horse.
    In retrospect, Randall recognized that the shadow running down the back of the man’s leg had been semen. Too much to be human.
    He hit Enter once more. He still had the front window to replace. He hit Enter all night. He muted the sound, but continued to watch when his phone rang. “As you might know,” the caller began, “the horse has certain talents that make it extraordinarily valuable to a select group of buyers.” It was the voice from a few nights back. “I feel duty-bound to warn you. Those people won’t hesitate to use violence to their ends.”
    Randall watched the video until it was Friday night and time to pick up his daughter for the weekend.
    They’d moved to the home place after Randall’s father had died. The three of them, Lisa just a baby. Randall’s pa had spent the last two years of his life in a care center, in town, where they’d go to see him almost every day. At the same time, the house had sat like a time capsule. The piano stood where it always had. There was a history attached to every plate or hammer. Nothing could be got rid of. Every throw pillow cued a long sermon to explain its every stain or the stitches where it had been mended. If Randall’s wife had moved a carving fork from one drawer to another he’d moved it back. She bought green paint to redecorate the upstairs bedroom, and he’d made her return it. Randall’s aunt had hung the wallpaper in that room. Every stitch in every quilt was sacrosanct. Every notch scratched in the kitchen door frame marked the growing up of someone now long dead. They’d become curators. Finally his wife had moved herself back into town. What all he saw as his legacy, Estelle took to be a curse.
    Lisa came to visit, resentful and bored, until he’d bought her Sour Kraut. She’d cared for that horse with the same intensity that he’d cared for the house and farm. Neither of them could resist something helpless.
    At Estelle’s house, Lisa tossed her overnight bag into Randall’s backseat. She was talking on her phone as she slid into the front seat beside him. She was saying, “Not my problem. If you think you can find another horse that will do the job don’t waste my time.” She snuck a glance at Randall and winked, telling the phone, “We’ve got other offers on the table.”
    Without looking at her, he asked, “Is it real?”
    Lisa touch-screened her phone. “Is what real?” Then, with a laugh, asked, “Are you talking about the video?”
    It was obscene. An atrocity.
    Rolling her eyes, Lisa reasoned, “Paris Hilton. Kim Kardashian. Pam Anderson. Rob Lowe. Who hasn’t made a sex tape?” She laughed. “Daddy, it’s a scream.”
    Randall gripped the steering wheel tighter. “So you’ve seen it?”
    It was an Internet classic, like a myth they’d read in school, she said. Leda and the Swan. Her friends had never seen anything more funny.
    Randall said it wasn’t funny. It was tragic.
    Her thumbs twitching over her phone’s tiny keys, summoning up facts, Lisa insisted, “Daddy, of course it’s funny.”
    Randall asked, why?
    She considered the question as if for the first time. “I don’t know. Because he was white, I guess.” She read details as they surfaced. The man was heterosexual, divorced with one child, and he died of a ruptured sigmoid colon. She grinned. “Isn’t this just perfect?” She nodded smugly at the phone’s screen. “He was a rich big shot for Hewlett-Packard or some other Fortune 500 member of the military-industrial complex.”
    Randall challenged, “What if it had been a girl your age?”
    Lisa wagged a finger at him. “If it showed a girl, then anyone who even watched the video would go to