Dune had learned, was learning, that when you lose enough people, you stop getting as close to the new ones who come into your life. She stopped looking ahead and started focusing all her attention on the memories. Things used to be so great, so pure, so just, so perfect. We look back and excavate the most beautiful versions of our histories.

Even the blood and gore are more exciting through a generational veil. In real life, death is not very exciting at all. Each time, each time, you see the struggle happening in the body. None of the bodies want to die, all of the bodies are being forced to give up their hold on life through shock or exhaustion. It’s not very exciting, when you can’t intervene, can’t be a superhero come to save the day. We start to realize life gets overwhelmed by death every single time.

But it wasn’t only time that Dune had wasted. She’d also forgotten to take seriously just how divergent human minds can be. When she came across those that were different from hers, she tended to get frustrated, trying to change them, trying to make them more positive, solution oriented, easier to be around. Later, she regretted this. She wished that she had seen her mother’s genius, and Marta’s creativity, Bab’s loyalty, Elouise’s moral righteousness. She wished she had seen in them all that difference which she could see so clearly now, and let those with the mindsets most challenging to her also be the most exciting.

Dune worked in the basement as much as she could stand it. She had over six hundred profiles now, with growing columns of photos along the wall, watching her. Her project was a solitary collective effort.

The pain of being in the house where her mother had died was too intense sometimes. Dune would risk driving around the wilderness of Detroit streets, winter tires pressing the early snow flat into water. She kept her beams off, using the moon and the light against the snow dusted yards to get around. If she even thought she saw someone she pulled over and tucked down in the car.

But no one else was driving around at night.

chapter twenty: Reality Slips

Marta was laying on the kitchen table, propped up on one elbow. She pushed a spoon towards Dune and then sat up and scooted over, opening her thighs. She lifted her skirt and leaned back on both elbows. Out of her body came what looked like a pale pink ice cream. “Taste it.”

Dune picked up the spoon and took the smallest scoop of cream from Marta’s pussy. She tasted it—fake strawberry flavor like in frosting or cheap shortcake, and maybe rose water?