Home-Grown Science Lesson

New:

I move back home, back into the room Sophia and I shared at 3 and 7 years old, 15 years ago, when we first moved here. Mom says “indefinitely” when asked how long I’m back at home. If I answer first, I say, “it’s temporary.” I sew curtains and hang posters and call it “my room.” 4 layers of paint and primer under the old blinds I unscrew show the color it was when I used to live in it, and a color beneath, that I never knew about. Sophia and I verbally map our home of 14 years, the rotating cycle of bedrooms. I am back where I began.

Crescent:

Dad is 6’ 3” and he has to lay, curved, to adjust the little telescope. He finds Venus with a marked reverence, then switches to a closer lens. “It is crescent-y tonight!” he exclaims, and spreads his cardigan on the rough roof so I can plant my elbow and peek. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen, I think, surprising myself. Venus, a disc minus some, and a spritz of stars around, a sparse halo. Sophia resets the telescope after I bump it 2 degrees off with my glasses frame. She bends at the waist and her shoulders arch, eyepiece and main mirror tube an extension of her, as I lean back, immobile, waiting.

Half:

I turn away, mostly, to pull my shorts up and aside. In the mirror I see no bruise: a surprise, because my whole thigh aches from yesterday’s rollerblade wipeout. “Good job, skin!” Sophia exclaims as I pivot halfway back to share the revelation. We stream “Folsom Prison Blues” on my speakers and walk the line between intimacy and exposure, half-clad in the newness of living together as not-kids.

Gibbous:

The whole family takes a quiz that tells you which television characters you’re most like. 28 questions: toggle the slider between two extremes. Sophia answers 55% scientific, 45% artistic. I slide it ¾ toward artistic. Dad nods his assent when we present our screens for him to compare. Somehow we both score Willow from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and Dad flicks on an episode. “I answered 75% masculine,” he offers, spurred by his affinity for the show. “It probably should have been more like…61%.” I don’t mention that I left the toggle 50% between masculine and feminine, and that maybe it should have been ¾ one way or the other, and that I’m really not sure. Our overlapping character profiles from “Star Wars” and “The Office” become a Punnett square, mapping our genetic crossover.

Full:

Though in college I collaged my dinner-plate with canned greens and cheap proteins, and ignored the white space showing through, Dad piles my plate high and hands it off. I take my place at the table just like I used to. It’s just barely oblong without the leaf, but we fit. Sophia passes her half-finished plate across the table-runner before I have to think to ask, and I scrape her surplus atop my half-finished helping. A decadent mix of my meat sauce and her plain red stuffs me “to the broom,” as she once said. Some turns of phrase leave the mouths of babes and stick, and in fact, Dad’s Twitter archives could fill a book with -isms and incidents from our childhood, words we forget until he reads them out again.

first-place winner of the Valparaiso University Isolated Art contest, May 2020