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Show Motherlunge a novel 91 14. Supernal Inversion Dorothy and I arrived at Walter's house in Supernal on New Year's Day. An inversion lay over the valley like an overfull lint screen, lending a strange and muffled coziness to the town. It had only been four months since I was last in my hometown, but already it felt pretend to me, with its bars advertising video poker and karaoke, its student-discount tanning salons, its acres of slush-filled parking lot half-full with pickups and dented muscle cars. What do people do here? I turned the car this way and that down the tree-lined streets, heading toward the public library and Walter's house next to it. My mind fell open to an old scene from ten years earlier, Walter walking toward his car with his clothes in a plastic bag and shouting back over his shoulder "Later, Thea!" and Dorothy screaming something something something... "Later, Thea," I murmured to myself as I pulled into the driveway at Walter's house and got out of the car. I walked stiffly around to Dorothy's side and lifted the dented door up on its hinges so I could open it. I held out my hand and pulled my mother out of the car the way one weighs an anchor. And then we were standing there in the driveway as the front door opened, and for me it was only a little like being home. For Dorothy? I think it wasn't like anything. She was beyond simile-somewhere I never go, obviously-flatlining utterly, figuratively speaking, saying nothing, nothing, nothing. |