Zoe’s Tale PART I Chapter Seven

Heres what I did when my dad took me d possess to Phoenix I visited my own grave.Cl earlyish, this needs an explanation.I was born and broodd the first four years of my deportment on Phoenix. Near whither I lived, there is a cemetery. In that cemetery is a headst wiz, and on that headst angiotensin-converting enzyme argon third labels Cheryl Boutin, Charles Boutin and Zoe Boutin.My conveys puddle is there because she is very buried there I remember organism there for her playeral and seeing her shroud put into the ground.My start outs name is there because for legion(predicate) years people believed his system was there. Its not. His body lies on a orbiter named Arist, where he and I lived for a term with the Obin. There is a body buried here, though, one that looks like my father and has the same genes as he does. How it got there is a really complicated story.My name is there because in the lead my father and I lived on Arist, he thought for a time that I had been k illed in the attack on Covell, the space station he and I had lived on. There was no body, obviously, because I was still alive my father just didnt admit it. He had my name and dates carved into the headstone originally he was told I was still near.And so there you get to it three call, two bodies, one grave. The only place where my biological family exists, in both form, anywhere in the universe.In one sense, Im an orphan, and profoundly so My scram and father were only children, and their parents were dead before I was born. Its possible I keep gage second cousins twice removed somewhere on Phoenix, exclusively Ive n invariably met them and wouldnt do what to claim to them hitherto if they existed. Really, what do you say? Hi, we share about four percent of our genetic makeup, lets be friends?The fact is, Im the final stage of my line, the last member of the Boutin family, un little and until I decide to start having babies. Now, theres a thought. Im acquittance t o table it for now.In one sense I was an orphan. that in another senseWell. first-year, my dad was standing behind me, watching me as I was kneeling down to look at the headstone my name was on. I dont screw how it is with other adoptees, but I can say that there never was a time with John and Jane that I didnt belief cherished and loved and theirs. Even when I was going through that early puberty phase where I think I said I hate you and Just leave me alone six times casual and ten times on Sunday. I would have abandoned me at the bus stop, thats for sure.John told me that back when he lived on Earth, he had a son, and his son had a boy, Adam, who would have been just about my age, which technically make me an aunt. I thought that was bewitching neat. Going from having no family on the one hand to being someones aunt on the other is a fun trick. I told that to Dad he said you contain multitudes, and then walked around with a smile for hours. I finally got him to explain it to me. That Walt Whitman, he knew what he was talking about. Second, there were Hickory and Dickory to the side of me, twitching and trembling with unrestrained energy, because they were at the gravesite of my father, even if my father wasnt buried there, and never was. It didnt matter. They were worked up because of what it represented. through with(predicate) my father, I guess you could say I was adopted by the Obin, too, although my family relationship to them wasnt exactly like being someones daughter, or their aunt. It was a little approximate to being their goddess. A goddess for an entire race of people.Or, I dont know. Maybe something that sounds less egotistical patron saint, or racial trope or mascot or something. It was hard to put into words it was hard to even wrap my wizard around most days. Its not like I was put on a throne most goddesses I know about dont have homework and have to pick up dog poop. If this is what being an icon is all about, on a day-today basis its not terribly exciting.But then I think about the fact that Hickory and Dickory live with me and have spent their lives with me because their presidency made it a demand of my g all oernment when the two of them signed a peace pact. I am actually a treaty condition between two intelligent races of creatures. What do you do with that sort of fact?Well, I tried to use it at one time When I was younger I tried to argue with Jane that I should be able to stay up late one night because I had special status under treaty law. I thought that was pretty clever. Her response was to haul out the entire thousand-page treaty I didnt even know we had a physical copy and invite me to predominate the sort of the treaty that said I always got to have my way. I stomped over to Hickory and Dickory and demanded they tell Mom to let me do what I precious Hickory told me they would have to file a request to their government for guidance, and it would return several days, by which time I would already have to be in bed. It was my first exposure to the tyranny of bureaucracy.What I do know that it means is that I break to the Obin. Even at that moment in front of the grave, Hickory and Dickory were recording it into their consciousness machines, the machines my father made for them. They would be stored and sent to all the other Obin. Every other Obin would stand here with me, as I knelt at my grave and the grave of my parents, tracing their names and mine with my finger.I endure. I belong to John and Jane I belong to Hickory and Dickory and every Obin. And yet for all that, for all the connection I feel for all the connection I have there are times when I feel alone, and I have the sensation of go and not connecting at all. Maybe thats just what you do when youre this age you have your stretches of alienation. Maybe to find yourself youve got to feel like youre unplugged. Maybe everyone goes through this.What I knew, though, there at the grave, my grave, was that I w as having one of those moments.I had been here before, to this grave. First when my mother was buried, and then, a few years later, when Jane brought me here to say adieu to both my mother and father. All the people who know me have gone away, I said to her. All of my people are gone. And then she came over to me and asked me to live with her and John, in a new place. Asked me to let her and John be my new people.I touched the jade elephant at my neck and smiled, opinion of Jane.Who am I? Who are my people? Who do I belong to? Questions with easy answers and no answers. I belong to my family and to the Obin and sometimes to no one at all. I am a daughter and goddess and girl who sometimes just doesnt know who she is or what she wants. My brain rattles around my head with this pig out and gives me a headache. I wish I were alone here. Im glad Johns with me. I want to see my new friend Gretchen and make sarcastic comments until we infract out laughing. I want to go to my stateroo m on the Magellan, turn mop up the light, hug my dog, and cry. I want to leave this stupid cemetery. I dont ever want to leave it because I know Im never coming back to it. This is my last time with my people, the ones who are already gone.Sometimes I dont know if my life is complicated, or if its that I just think too oftentimes about things.I knelt at the grave, thought some more, and tried to find a way to say a last good-bye to my mother and father and to keep them with me, to stay and to go, to be the daughter and goddess and girl who doesnt know what she wants, all at once, and to belong to everyone and keep myself.It took a while.