When Marsha “Pink” Krakow returned to what she knew was her true home now, Big Sandy on the oldest Bellissaria continent, her Mother was waiting. With a big surprise. “I bought this for you,” she said to her shocked daughter after she arrived, indicating the trailer. “Pink, you see, or as close as I could get to that hot variation you prefer.” Edward, her Eddie, was already blackening his patented vegetable stew dogs on what Wheeler told him was his new grill. He was already sold.
“Oh. And that pink scooter you’re standing beside! What do you think?”
Marsha was thinking of *price*, not necessarily money price but emotional price. And here it comes.
“I can see you’re speechless, dearest. Come sit beside me and we’ll talk.” Wheeler patted the lounging couch across from her and then pulled out an apple to eat. “Price?” Marsha wanted to ask her so bad. “Price price price?” And here it comes.
“Have you talked to Serenity since you’ve been here (chomp, chew chew chew)? Never mind, dear, I know you have. You told her about Shelley, my *actual* daughter.”
“*I’m* your daughter,” she wanted to protest at this point, but knew it technically wasn’t true — in a way. Shelley provided the body and added a lot to the personality as well. But Brown was also there inside. Conscience? Mere gestures? She wasn’t quite sure yet about the so-called 3rd component, the last of a trilogy. And then herself up front and on top of course, resurrected from what happened in photo-novel 19 that she doesn’t like to think about a lot. Cook for the Ozmo Devils. Dead in the head in bed like Jed. “Why didn’t you tell me about Serenity?” she actually said aloud. “That she wasn’t her cousin but her *wife*?”
“Oh it’s just one of those things that slips the mind (chomp; chew, chew, chew). Lots of important stuff going on up there,” and here she pauses in her apple eating to tap on her forehead. “I’m still the mayor of that damn Meat City and its dominant male energy. *I’m* more male than them, despite the body, the femininity,” she decided to put it. Marsha understood. Her mother had to put the town council (etc.) in their place or they’d gain the upper hand again, the blame misogynists. Dominant sex, *pheh*. Marsha had to do the same with her Eddie in a lesser way. It’s just how men are raised in our society in part, she figured. So she didn’t blame him *all* that much for his own, lesser brand of the disease of the mind.
Marsha had to ask this next”: “W-why, then, oh why… did you put me in prison? Turn me into a *doll* Feed me those drugs through my head to think that I *wasn’t* in prison but next door, singing karaoke until the wee hours of the night? With the fake doll looking on?”
“Rockaway Beach?” Wheeler started her answer, citing the name of the first place which was also its location. “Kenzie’s Korner in Kuradov?” she said the same about the second. Now the circumstances.
(to be continued)
Sunklands 