Ebook, idumea

motes-played/content/006.tex

@@ -48,7 +48,7 @@ Motes increasingly needed out of this strict adherence to form.
 
 The inflection point came when she, the Motes who had been forked not three years prior, the Motes who was still a human who looked much like A Finger Pointing, her immediate down-tree, sat in a paint tray while painting a stage-wide sunset on a scrim.
 
-There she was, kneeling carefully on the stage and twisting around to see the red splotch ground into the seat of her sturdy work overalls, and laughing. She laughed as she recognized the mess she had made—one big butt-print on the matte black of the stage—and she laughed at the way the paint had very clearly started to seep into the denim of her overalls. She laughed as memories flooded into her mind, of red paint on corduroy, of Miss Willard's snippy admonition, of her mom's patient reassurances. She laughed and, rather than wave away the mess that she had made on her overalls, she lay down on her front and summoned up a smaller paintbrush instead of the roller she had been using, loaded it up with paint, and started filling in the awkward splotch on the stage into the body of some critter, round and soft. She took a break from her sunset and instead painted a fat, cartoonish skunk all in red.
+There she was, kneeling carefully on the stage and twisting around to see the red splotch ground into the seat of her sturdy work overalls, and laughing. She laughed as she recognized the mess she had made—one big butt-print on the matte black of the stage—and she laughed at the way the paint had very clearly started to seep into the denim of her overalls. She laughed as memories flooded into her mind, of red paint on corduroy, of Miss Willard's snippy admonition, of her mother's patient reassurances. She laughed and, rather than wave away the mess that she had made on her overalls, she lay down on her front and summoned up a smaller paintbrush instead of the roller she had been using, loaded it up with paint, and started filling in the awkward splotch on the stage into the body of some critter, round and soft. She took a break from her sunset and instead painted a fat, cartoonish skunk all in red.
 
 By the time That It Might Give The World Orders, the play's director, found her, she had added an idealized field of grass and dandelions, had painted in a frolicking fennec fox in blue, and still lay on her front, the seat of her pants colored in red from the paint she had sat in.
 
@@ -142,7 +142,7 @@ Still wrong-footed, Motes leaned away from her cocladist. ``And the third?''
 
 After a moment, Slow Hours spoke again, the knife-edge of prophecy letting off of her throat. ``There are as many reasons to keep someone for yourself as there are ways to do so. The whole of the fifth stanza—and, to a lesser extent, the whole of Au Lieu de Rêve—has closed around you. Not tight, of course, we are not keeping you trapped and hidden away, but we are all intensely, intensely protective of you. We have all endeavored to make your life here the best that it can be, as you have invited us to do. This was part of our conversations going all the way back, was it not? That you enjoyed leaning into being cared for, and we enjoyed having someone to collectively care for? We do not like creeps around our Motes, and so we see creeps everywhere.''
 
-Once Motes saw what she was saying, saw through the everblue tint of prophecy and her own little game of two truths and a lie, the skunk's shoulders relaxed and she slumped against her, sniffling.
+Once Motes saw what she was saying, saw through the everblue tint of prophecy and her own little game of two truths and a lie, the skunk's shoulders relaxed and she slumped against her cocladist, sniffling.
 
 ``We all love you, Speck. That is all.''
 
@@ -222,6 +222,6 @@ Motes dreamed.
 
 She dreamed and dreamed and dreamed, her mind wandering over her past, there in the dark, there alone, after A Finger Pointing left, there in her extra soft bed with her overstuffed duvet and all of her stuffed animals.
 
-At some point, hours or days or minutes later, she slept and dreamed true. She dreamed that she was sitting in a field of well-tended grass that was nonetheless dotted liberally with dandelions, speckled with bumblebees. She dreamed that she had all the wonder of a child and that the day was sunny and lovely and the grass was inviting her to roll around in it, and just above, just in the distance, a hyperblack rectangle, a hole in the world that hungrily devoured all of the light that it could, lingered, and it was neither good nor bad, and even with its insatiable hunger, the day was sunny and lovely and the grass was inviting her to roll around in it.
+At some point, hours or days or perhaps mere minutes later, she slept and dreamed true. She dreamed that she was sitting in a field of well-tended grass that was nonetheless dotted liberally with dandelions, speckled with bumblebees. She dreamed that she had all the wonder of a child and that the day was sunny and lovely and the grass was inviting her to roll around in it, and just above, just in the distance, a hyperblack rectangle, a hole in the world that hungrily devoured all of the light that it could, lingered, and it was neither good nor bad, and even with its insatiable hunger, the day was sunny and lovely and the grass was inviting her to roll around in it.
 
 And then she awoke.