## Cherry POV November 3rd, 2000 Dear Mom, I saw you today. Well, not the “real” you–but the dreams have been getting too real for comfort. I was on stage again for Little Miss Marlowe, back to my 13-year-old self in that evening dress you painfully handstitched white strings through to my perfect fit . I used to think the bright stage lights were painful, but seeing a crowd full of nothing but you froze me in place. I think I’ve changed a bit though. Or time has passed enough for me to understand you’re not here. For that moment at least. Ookay, I'm lying a little when I’m saying I’m fine. Not long after, I had another dream about your funeral and your grave which I rushed to wake up from. Solomon tried comforting me after our dead mom dreams overlapped which was nice of him. Though I ended up finding more comfort in revisiting Marsha in the middle school cafeteria. (sorry Mom but it was a WAY less stressful time back then) We’re still figuring out this whole Pris/Sandra possession thing and I’m trying to stay safe and sane and fully human, but I’m unsure what options we have in compromising with Pris. The more I think about possession…having a body but not full control–piloting through life without agency… Nevermind. I’ll figure out a way out of this. I have to. ## Solomon POV I remember attending this funeral in my youth. Dad and Shiv are different here. They grieve, and reach to me for comfort. And despite everything between us — all the ways Dad had infuriated me since I was a boy, still fresh in my mind from Pris’ visions, and what they both had done to me just a few months ago — I reach out back to them. There are moments when everything can be set aside. I don’t remember anything of her. I do remember that before this funeral, I had never thought to miss my mother, or even be curious about what kind of devil she was. Looking back, perhaps it was because I lacked for nothing in my childhood. There was always plenty of help around the house, fretting about whether I’d be on time, or if I was summoning my new fire powers indoors. I was well-fed, kept clean — and so I hadn’t even *recognized* that I knew nothing of her until that day, when I was suddenly whisked away in a limo headed to some graveyard. Dad had gone on ahead in another car, so it was his nervous secretary who rattled off the logistics to Shiv and I, trying to get us up to speed on the basic contours of my mother’s biography for the first time. Or, perhaps I hadn’t thought to miss her as my mother because Dad always made it seem like she was no different from any other devil woman — yet another who drifted into his view, was pulled into his life when it suited him, and was shown the door when she became more trouble than she was worth — and she certainly must have become trouble eventually, from the few passing remarks he made about her time under his roof. And as a young boy, I believed him — that she was merely incidental to us, a brief outside connection who had benefited us for some time, but no longer. But then, we arrived, and I saw— her funeral portrait, *my likeness reflected in it*— Over the years, I’ve come to learn of Dad as a man of many faults, but I remember this day was when I first saw him as such. With all his considerable influence over a young son who revered him and believed anything he said, he had attempted — and then failed — to obscure this truth that was so clearly inconvenient to him: that she had been a part of *our family*. I remember standing in front of that portrait for hours, studying it, imagining this stranger being tied to us with the same undeniable blood tie that bound the three of us, so that she would be ours and we would be hers. That uniquely unconditional gift, in a world where everything else must be contracted and bargained for. That uniquely inescapable curse. In reality, Dad left this funeral in the same car he came in without saying much to us. But he seems a tad more talkative in this vision, so I ask him a few questions, even if I know the answers would be false, just to hear him say it in his voice. —*the regret in his voice when he says he hadn’t been greedy enough to hold on to her*— I sigh. Enough of this. She is gone now; let us hold tightly to the things we do still have. And as for us? When we meet again, I will kill you, just as you have killed me, because I am your son. But after, after, *after*— how could I ever let you go?