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Show Motherlunge a novel 61 "We're in here!" I shouted to her in the hall. Echo. Pavia came into the kitchen looking newly weary. "To get here I just followed the star in the East," Joseph continued happily, sliding out a chair for Pavia. He had had a shower and changed out of the tracksuit, into jeans and a health fair t-shirt, Supernal Walks! "How old are you, anyway?" Pavia asked. She was holding her fork like a pencil over her plate, which I had filled for her fifteen minutes prior. "Twenty-six moons. Twenty-six years young." "You're Native American," Dorothy asserted to him unnecessarily, "Kootenai- Salish tribe." The lightning bolt on her zipper pull quavered as she sat up a little straighter in her chair and looked around to us, changed pronouns. "And he's a very old soul." Creepily, this is what she used to say about me in parent-teacher conferences by way of explaining certain maladaptive social behaviors, like my crouching in the janitor's closet during recess. Pavia snorted. "You wrote that on our wedding card. About me and Jack." "Yeah!" I sang, having had a bit to drink by then. Pavia back at home-and on my side, sounding like me? "So Dorothy," I said, turning toward our shared progenitor, "Does everyone have one, an old soul? Doesn't anyone get to have a new one? Reduce, reuse, recycle?" "How is Jack?" Dorothy asked Pavia, ignoring me. "Do you see him?" Pavia chewed and chewed, looking at Dorothy as if she (Dorothy) were the mouthful that was somehow resisting digestive enzymes. |