Stagtine, 25. Mycho-What?

Section 2, Chapter 8

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Stagtine, 24. Tilling Ourselves

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One evening, a few hard days later, around an evening fire that crackled beyond its custom, Morgan opened an old textbook across her very pregnant belly. We had spent the previous holiday season reorganizing our home’s library and cataloguing new titles. Memories of college fashioned astride memories of childhood and home, a youth categorized genre first and then alphabetically.

“I read this in college,” she said, a sad reverie.

“Look at this one,” I returned. It was taped and held together by a prayer and smelled like my mom’s hand cream. The Door in the Wall.

Good and bad memories alike alighted like a mockingbird on the chimney and also like a black vulture on the naked black walnut. But that night, sitting across the evening fire, something, some thought, maybe even, some memory surfaced and Morgan found herself holding a particularly old book. Forever ago, a lost dream from a lost time, she had studied molecular science in college on a full track scholarship and graduated with a degree in biology. She finished her degree in three years and she did it two years before I did. She is two years younger than me and, to be honest, also ten years older.

“What’s that?” I half inquired, holding a book of my own and without looking up.

Its worn and dog-eared pages seemed familiar to her touch and she fumbled through them like braille. Delicately and without looking.

“Nothing,” she returned. Her eyes fixed on the fire. The flames seemed to dissolve in her pupils like rifts of clouds that heave the sky into a speckled, Dutch blue. Inverted islands of memory.