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Show Moon - 242 A shocked silence falls into me and I think, yes, it does feel like that. And I've moved to the front of the line as if it's my turn now: I've come of age! Take me! What absurd lengths I've gone to in order to be both unlike and like my mother! Fall from the tree like spoiled fruit and let them shovel you under. Then you get to start all over from seed. Womb. Tomb. You're cast out of the ancestral castle and journey across a wasteland unto a grail buried in ashes. The men in those stories find a hideous crone who must be killed or restored to her beauty, and then it's finally home again-a castle to claim, land to till, a woman to breed. What is the story of the women heroes who took brave journeys? I think most of them never make it home again. Pocahontas sailed to England. Laced in court regalia like a web-caught moth, she curtsied to the king, smiled and danced with all her heart to save her people-a method that almost never works. My Indian foremother enchanted the court, but she had no defense against the genteel germs of London, and she died on board ship returning to Virginia. She had a son, Thomas, who, if our family legend is true, is another one of my real fathers. The good women have to die young in our stories. I don't know why this should be. I think that dying to save a kingdom is too sacred a story for mere mortals to understand. The Jews used to heap blame on a symbolic goat. Long ago were the fisher-kings, the exiled Oedipus, the goddess daughters abducted, kept underground. Jesus, they say, gave his life once and for all. Any more sacrifice is perhaps redundant, even wasteful. We live in a world cut off from these collective redemptions, the Jesus craze notwithstanding. So all alone we |