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<p>Bristling, Motes glared over at Dry Grass. “It is all well and good that she not like me, but to not like my family is bullcrap.”</p>
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<p>Dry Grass nodded, expression serious. “It absolutely is. She has gotten quite upset at me a few times, but I just smile and nod and tune her out when she goes into her self-righteous spirals. I am not the type to cut anyone out of my life, for better or worse, but I will absolutely ignore people.”</p>
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<p>Motes huffed, nodded. “Good. If you stop talking to me, I <em>will</em> cry.”</p>
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<p>“Perish the thought!” The Odist laughed and leaned over to hug her cocladist, careful of her nails. “I will not, do not worry, my dear. You are stuck with me for a good while yet.”</p>
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<p>“Perish the thought!” The Odist laughed and leaned over to hug her cocladist, careful of her nails. “I will not. Do not worry, my dear, you are stuck with me for a good while yet.”</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2024-01-05</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2024-01-13</p>
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<p>In the bowl of the ‘U’ sat all of the common areas. A pool — one with seats and jets, one that could be a hot tub seeing a hundred as easily as an Olympic pool — a few tennis courts for the few — who? — who actually enjoyed the game, a liberal dotting of grills — everyone had a favorite — for cook outs, a “community center” which had long ago turned into a movie theatre-<em>cum</em>-cuddlepit…</p>
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<p>And there, right at the very lowest point of the bowl of the ‘U’ sat a playground. What was initially intended to be Motes’s haunt, hers and her friends, had long ago turned into a place for late-night musings. Thousands and thousands of times over the years, couples or small groups or lone individuals would converge on the swings or the slide and sit in the dark, staring up on the star-speckled sky, the Milky Way glowing bright enough to light one’s face beyond even the gold-and-black of the rest of the neighborhood with its sodium vapor lamps and countless darknesses. It was a place for play, yes, and it was often used for such, but it was also a place for couples to work out their problems or groups to chat about everything and nothing or for one to sit alone, drunk, beneath the stars, looking up and feeling good or bad or simply introspective.</p>
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<p>It was not dark now.</p>
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<p>There, on the swings, sat a child, a girl, looking to be perhaps twelve or thirteen with brown hair cut into an unruly bob, pale skin shining in the sun, swaying lazily back and forth as they faced away from her. She looked mostly down, skidding the heels of her shoes through the gravel beneath the swings, scooping the pebbles out of the way and then smoothing them back into place with her toes.</p>
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<p>There, on the swings, sat a child, a girl, looking to be perhaps twelve or thirteen with brown hair cut into an unruly bob, pale skin shining in the sun, swaying lazily back and forth as she faced away from Motes. She looked mostly down, skidding the heels of her shoes through the gravel beneath the swings, scooping the pebbles out of the way and then smoothing them back into place with her toes.</p>
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<p>Motes moved quietly through the grass — quietly enough that the girl did not notice her — and sat down on the free swing within that segment.</p>
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<p>“Hi, Sarah,” she said.</p>
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<p>“Motes! Hi!” the girl said, then hesitated. “You’re Big Motes today. Do you want me to Big Sarah?”</p>
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<p>“That’s your name, though. Tell me about how that doesn’t <em>feel</em> like cutting you out of the clade.” Sarah smiled gently, adding, “Not that I don’t believe you, I just want to understand where you’re coming from on this.”</p>
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<p>“I guess it is that she has not told anyone but her stanza not to talk to me. To us, I mean. Her and In Dreams’s stanzas talk to each other. They still talk to the second, third, and fourth. They still talk to What Lives and so on in the ninth. We talk to all of those people, too.” She smiled sidelong at Sarah. “So I guess I see where you are going. I do still see her as an aunt because she has not actually said that we are not family — or like a family — she has just cut off contact. She has implied that we <em>are</em> still family, but that I did something wrong.”</p>
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<p>Sarah laughed. “I really was just trying to figure things out, not lead you along, but that’s an important connection to make, there. Family members cutting off others in the family is common enough to be a whole area of study. How does it feel to treat the rest of the clade as an extended family, though?”</p>
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<p>(( why Sarah goes little mode with Motes: that infinitely wiser kid who is like a year and a half older than you ))</p>
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<p>“That is, like…my whole bit, is it not? I am play-acting the kid. I am method-acting, and Pointillist and Beholden and Slow Hours and everyone is in on it.”</p>
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<p>“Even Hammered Silver? Even those who <em>aren’t</em> in on it?”</p>
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<p>Motes frowned.</p>
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<p>“It’s okay if you act as though they are,” Sarah said. “Or if they become a part of your internal conception of the play. They don’t need to be actively in on it.”</p>
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<p>“Right,” she mumbled, looking out into the neighborhood and swaying gently from side to side in her swing. “I guess it makes more sense when you talk about family members cutting each other off. If that is a thing that families do with any frequency, then there is no reason for me to not incorporate that.”</p>
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<p>“‘No reason’?” Sarah asked, picking up on the rhythm of Motes’s swaying.</p>
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<p>“Well, obviously I hate it!” she said, laughing. “But if I am going to get shit on like this, then I guess all I can do–”</p>
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<p>“‘All’?”</p>
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<p>Motes snorted. “<em>One</em> thing I can do is reclaim it and turn it into a family spat, right?”</p>
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<p>Sarah laughed and pushed herself to start swinging in earnest. “That’s what I was getting at, yeah. But tell me more about being Big Motes. You’ve talked about the family aspect of it, but it sounds like you were thinking about this even before Hammered Silver sent you her letter.”</p>
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<p>Before she realized what she was doing, Motes was already starting to swing along with Sarah. Back to that movement, back to that little twinge of play. <em>This</em> was why she appreciated her therapist, all of these little nudges, all of this meeting her on her terms. After all, had she not appeared at first as a girl a few years older than her, as she had so many times before? One of those girls who seems infinitely wise to someone younger?</p>
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<p>Motes smiled faintly out to the world as it swung beneath and around her. “I do not know that there was anything that spurred on all of the discussions or the dream — though I imagine the dream was a result of all of the thinking that I had been doing leading up to it. It was just on my mind. Maybe I have been doubting myself more of late.”</p>
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<p>“Doubting how? The last time we talked, you didn’t sound like you were doubting yourself. You talked about how everyone had a different nickname for you.”</p>
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<p>She laughed, feeling earnest joy at the memory. “Dot! Speck! Mote! Kiddo and skunklet and little one,” she called out to sky and grass. “Yes, you are right. But I also talked about how I had fallen again into that feeling that maybe my name had played a role in who I had become. Motes, yes? Small, little things that drift across your vision. Microscopic things. I talked about whether the name came first, or the nature, yes?”</p>
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<p>“Mmhm. You used Beholden as a counter example.”</p>
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<p>“I said she should have been in charge of lights,” Motes said, still grinning. “‘Beholden to the heat of the lamps’? That has nothing to do with music or sound.”</p>
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<p>Still smiling, herself, Sarah countered, “And then I pointed out Loss For Images and That It Might Give. ‘That it might give the world orders’ being primarily a director is pretty on the nose.”</p>
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<p>“Yeah,” she said, sighing as the grin started to fade. “Yeah. There is a mix of both. It does not matter whether or not the name or the nature came first, not in this case. What matters is that it got stuck in my craw, right? I got stuck thinking about it, and then Hammered Silver sent me her stupid letter and it all came to a head.”</p>
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<p>“Some things are just coincidences.”</p>
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<p>Motes nodded.</p>
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<p>“Hammered Silver sent you the letter because she learned about Dry Grass visiting the fifth stanza. That’s not something you had any say over — at least not beyond liking when she visits — and certainly not anything to do with how you were feeling, right?”</p>
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<p>She remained silent. She remained silent for a long time, and when the arc of her swing started to slow, she began pumping her legs, working vigorously to get herself swinging as high as she could, swinging to the point where she looked now straight down to the center of the Earth, and now directly up to the heavens.</p>
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<p>“Motes?” Sarah’s voice came from a distance, from all the way down there with her feet planted on the ground, from where she was anchored.</p>
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<p>“Maybe it did,” she hollered. She imagined the way her voice must have Dopplered past her therapist with each arc of the swing and started to giggle. “Maybe me talking about this with Dry Grass did lead to the letter. Maybe it is my fault.”</p>
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<p>“You mean you think she went and told Hammered Silver to let her visit you after you talked about your worries?” Sarah called out to her.</p>
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<p>“Yeah!”</p>
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<p>“What does that change?”</p>
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<p>“Nothing!” Motes said, laughing joyously. “It changes nothing. In fact, I hope that <em>is</em> the case! At that point, Hammered Silver really <em>is</em> just a bitch.”</p>
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<p>Sarah laughed, and Motes felt the sound in the air as she breezed past.</p>
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<p><em>I respect her as a person, but I do not like her,</em> Dry Grass had said. <em>And I certainly do not respect her authority.</em></p>
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<p><em>Do not worry, my dear,</em> Dry Grass had said. <em>You are stuck with me for a good while yet.</em></p>
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<p>Perhaps Dry Grass had excused herself from the sixth stanza. Perhaps she had taken an opportunity to make her opinions known. Perhaps she had spoken up, talked back, shot down a little bit of Hammered Silver’s authority by standing up for Motes.</p>
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<p>Perhaps she ought to hug Dry Grass extra-tight next time she saw her.</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2024-01-13</p>
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