Maggie read the paper letters strung over the front porch stairs before she even got her hand up to wave to Erik.

W-E-H-A-V-E-J-O-I-N-T-C-U-S-T-O-D-Y-O-F-A-D-O-G!

Soup had objected to the less labour-intensive “We Have A Dog” on factual grounds, but Maggie didn’t know that yet. She only knew she had missed something again. Her hand wilted. “I walked out on a dog just so we could go to a…” She caught herself, cleared her throat and spoke a bit louder, “I had fun, Daddy. We have fun. Mom’s going to hate her present.  I love you.”

He pulled her suitcase from her hand and rested it atop his wheeled trunk. “I’ve got your stuff, Mag-Pirate. Run ahead and find out what happened for me, yeah?”

She grinned, and he managed a smile.

◈◈◈

He saw Maggie running up the street, waving, so he ran down the stairs to meet her and pulled over the plywood gate. She hugged him, and then leaned past him to gesture at the multicoloured paper letters. “Do you have an explanation written down for my convenience, too, or are you gonna wing it?”

He snickered and shook his head. “Ahem,” he said.

He held up his hand asking for her to wait, just in case she got impatient with him. He was gonna get to the dog eventually.

“Was feeling super sad you left us back in June,” he sang. “We’ve done a lot of stuff, but I’ve been missing you. Ann helped me write the words and Lola helped me too. Oh-a, oh-a. Got lots of new friends. Oh-a, oh-a. Want you to meet them. Hyacinth fixed Sam, now she likes us. Hyacinth fixed Sam, now she likes us. Soup hid Sam for a long time, then she got hurt but now she’s fine. Oh-a-aho oh. John and me can still be friends, now we hate Hayes and Donovan!”

He leaned in and spoke aside, “I don’t, I think they’re hilarious and they gave me a toy, but they wouldn’t stop making ABBA jokes and let us have breakfast, so my uncle says if they come back here he’s gonna kill them.”

He raised his voice and snapped back to the melody, “Soup hid Sam for a long time! Then she got hurt but now she’s fine! She likes me now, so she’s half or, like, fifteen-to-twenty-percent, if we’re being fair, and it was annoying Soup, but now the lyrics don’t scan,” he gasped a breath, “mine! You are — partial dog owner! You are — a partial dog owner! ’Cos Hyacinth fixed Sam, now she likes us! Hyacinth fixed Sam, now she likes us!”

Maggie doubled over cackling. She waved a hand at him. “Okay, okay! Stop! I’m gonna pee!”

Erik grinned at her. “I wanted to play it on violin, but I couldn’t get Angie to do the lyrics. She sounds like that cat food commercial with all the meowing. The point is the lyrics. Ann and Lola worked really hard.”

“Who’s Lola?”

Erik sighed. “I’m supposed to say she’s Ann’s ‘friend,’ but Ann told the whole house they were having sex and she was really happy about it, so I think it’s dumb. She has a fake eye like me, and a whole arm. She let Milo and Hyacinth take it apart.” He lowered his voice again, “My uncle never brings home ‘friends,’ Do you think he needs a sex life or is he too old? I was embarrassed to ask Soup.”

“I wish you were embarrassed to ask me,” Maggie said. “I have no idea, but I sure hope he’s too old.”

“What about Hyacinth? I think she’s friends with Cerise, but not ‘friends.’”

“I dunno. How old is she?”

“Three. Milo dropped the cake and that was all the candles we had left. Hi!”

Sanaam tipped his trunk upright and leaned on Maggie’s suitcase. “So what’d I miss?”

Erik said, “Ahem.”

◈◈◈

Mordecai was sitting in one of the nice chairs with an open book and a dog in his lap. He did not seem too bothered by the fact that this dog had visible bear-trap teeth in its jaw, and an empty eye socket that had been plated over with silver metal. He had one casual hand on its head, which he removed when it looked up and wagged at Erik. He folded the book and indicated the animal with a pointed finger. “I’m a dog person! Who knew? Your mother can’t figure it out, it’s driving her nuts.”

The General was standing beside the other chair and did not appear perturbed in the least.

“Samantha is not your dog, we’re just here for the cake,” Soup said. He was wearing, Maggie noted, his red bow tie and a pair of long pants. But they were still serviceably dirty, so she knew it really was him.

Samantha climbed stiffly down from the chair and gave a low bark in Soup’s direction, asking if these new guys were with him. She wagged tentatively. Her tail clicked.

“Holy shhh-amoley,” Maggie said, with a glance at her mother. “Did she get creamed by a truck?”

“Just a car,” Soup said, offended. The car was bad enough. They didn’t need to go adding tonnage and wheels.

Maggie extended a cautious hand for sniffing. “Is it safe?”

“Close your hand, please, Magnificent,” said the General. “It is less threatening to the animal.”

Mystified, Maggie did so.

“Strictly speaking, you should let a dog approach you — please bear that in mind, Captain, I see you grinning back there. Contain yourself; at Samantha’s scale you are a mythic giant. In your case, Magnificent, the animal is aware that you are one of our puppies, and she will cut you some slack on that basis. This dog is also highly food-motivated. I would trust her with your life after you’ve fed her a few treats, unless she had to choose between your life and peanut butter.”

Samantha gave the hand a lick, as if checking to make sure there wasn’t any peanut butter involved right now.

“You may consider yourself introduced. Be careful where you pet her. Pay attention, she will let you know if it hurts,” said the General. “Tell me something you’ve learned while you were away.”

Maggie opened her mouth, and Sanaam said, “Why does the child have to learn things all the time, huh? You’re going to give her an ulcer before she’s thirteen! Whatever happened to ‘hello’?”

“Hello,” the General said dryly. “Magnificent?”

“Orcas can only hold their breath fifteen minutes and the sciences are more sexist than the military,” Maggie said. “Sir.”

“That is quite a high bar to clear. What is your reasoning?”

“Miss Buenaventura can’t even get gloves that fit when she does lab work but all the uniforms have ladies’ sizes. She likes field work better because she’s scared she’s gonna lose a finger in the centrifuge.”

“Interesting.” The General bowed. “Welcome home.”

“Let’s go upstairs,” Sanaam said.

“Dad,” Maggie said. “Cake.”

Sanaam laughed airily. “Ah-ha-ha, are we having Mag-Pirate’s belated birthday cake now?”

Mordecai looked puzzled. “It’s an option, but I’d prefer to hold it until after dinner. Is that all right with you two?”

“It’s very considerate! Let me unpack my things and I’ll be right back!” He latched on to the General’s arm and tried to drag her.

She resisted, “I am not one of your things.”

“I haven’t seen you in three months, damn it, can’t we have a couple of minutes alone?” He smiled at Mordecai. “We’re married. I’m married to this person. I miss her.”

“If you say so,” said Mordecai.

She regarded both of them with a frown, but a moment later she allowed her husband to pull her up the stairs.

◈◈◈

“My gift has some kind of a timer on it, doesn’t it?” said the General. “Is it about to explode? Is there glitter involved? As a semi-responsible adult human being, you are obligated to tell me if you are about to cover our quarters in glitter. I will enforce this. I know where you sleep.”

Sanaam threw a cheap paper scrapbook on the bed. The cover had flowers on it and promised Happy Memories. “We started clipping crossword puzzles out of the local paper once we got to Moro, and we took pictures of us doing it. There’s about a dozen in there with Maggie petting wild animals too, which we paid for at a circus in Zongli, but she wanted to see if we could fool you into thinking I’m a horrible parent. I’m not going to bother with it because I really am a horrible parent. You remember how our daughter set Hyacinth on fire but it was your fault?”

The General nodded warily.

“Well, I’ve got you beat.” He winced and covered his eyes with a hand. “I took her to a minstrel show.”

◈◈◈

Maggie examined the bedroom door with narrowed eyes. When it remained closed for a good five minutes, she lowered her voice and said, “Who’s home? Did you guys invite anyone else for cake?”

“Milo and Calliope and Hyacinth are building some horrible thing in the basement,” Soup said. “Did you know that little baby has her own goggles?”

“I wanted Seth to come but he said it’s not fair to spring him on you like that,” Erik said. “Also, I think he’s scared of Auntie Hyacinth now. What’s going on?”

Maggie knocked on the basement doorway and called down, “Hey, you guys? Sorry, Milo. I’ll pick those up later. I’m home. Milo, I swear I will pick them up for you later. I need you for something. Do you mind being Ann? I want the one who can tell me what you think. I’m starting to think you don’t trust me, Milo. That hurts my feelings. It’s all right, just take a break for a minute. I need some opinions. That okay?”

“No problem!” Calliope’s voice called back.

“Maggie?” Erik said.

“We are having an emergency symposium on whether or not it’s okay for me to still like ‘Turkey in the Straw,’” Maggie said gravely. “While my dad is distracted.” She sighed. “I don’t think we can get Fred or Penny over here in time. I sure wish we had a phone. This is gonna be hard.”

◈◈◈

“What is a ‘minstrel show,’ Captain?”

Sanaam groaned. “It’s white people singing and dancing and pretending they’re black. I know it sounds racist as hell, but I thought it would be cute. Like White Yuletide! You know? I’m not from the ILV, we just get their movies. I’m a tourist!”

“What is White Yuletide?”

He stared at her. “Oh, come on!” He threw up both hands. “How do you not know White Yuletide? You’re putting me on! They show it every weekend in Yule at La Stella! Are they not still doing that? This is a holiday classic we’re talking about. The music is all over the radio! ‘I’m dreaming of a white Yuletide?’”

“It sounds racist already.”

“No! It’s white because of the snow. They want it to snow. This ex-general sunk his life savings into a ski lodge…” He scowled. “This movie is wall-to-wall soldiers. How have you not ever seen this movie? How have you not even heard of this movie? I don’t believe you! What do you do with yourself when I’m not home? Get some culture!”

◈◈◈

Maggie had put everyone around the kitchen table, save Milo (who was changing), the dog (who preferred to investigate the cabinets for spare food), and the baby.

The baby went into a largish playpen in the dining room — the simplest non-magical solution for childcare during magic season, which also worked post-magic-season. Calliope had obviously painted the barbed wire around the rail and labelled it MAXIMUM SECURITY, that was her sense of humour. Maggie was less sure who’d put Florian’s accidental sculpture upside-down in place of the chandelier and fixed it to glow, but she’d have to ask later.

“I want to hear about everything,” Maggie told them firmly. “It’s not that I don’t care. I especially want to play with Samantha, because she is awesome. I’m sorry she got hurt and I wanna know why you have different pants, Soup.”

“The old ones had blood stains and I am a man now,” Soup said.

“That’s cute. No you’re not.” She patted his hand. “But, you guys, I have been holding this in for two weeks and my head’s about to blow up. I can’t talk to Dad about it, he just thinks he failed at parenting. This is way more complicated. I am mad at a culture. I can’t set a whole country on fire. Yet,” she hedged. She waved her hands to cut off any protest. “Anyway, it’s not practical. I really wish we had Fred. He’s from there. Sorta. Maybe he gets it.”

“The purple gentleman under discussion is not allowed back in this house,” Mordecai said stiffly. “He knows what he did.”

“They gave you a fun new hat for the beach,” Erik muttered.

“It is a white sombrero with ‘Fernando’ embroidered on it in silver thread and they both know exactly what they did!”

Hyacinth was grinning. “I can’t believe they pulled that off in less than twenty-four hours. I’m gonna give them free healthcare until the day I die.”

Mordecai stood and slapped both hands on the table. “You’re gonna give it to them on the porch, because they are not allowed back in the house!”

Maggie stood on a chair and raised her hands for quiet. “I love you all very much, but if you don’t let me tell you about my problems now, I cannot be held responsible for my emotional reaction, okay?”

◈◈◈

“Ah, yes. Here it is. It is, in fact, culturally significant. I stand corrected. ‘A fun-filled holiday musical extravaganza. Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye and Rosemary Clooney. Four stars.’” She read silently for a moment.

“Why do you have a book called ‘Fifty Years of Miramar: The Reel Essentials’ sitting right here on your dresser, waiting for me?” Sanaam said weakly.

“Calliope has asked me to the movies on more than one occasion since your departure,” said the General. “This is research.” She held up the book. “It doesn’t say anything about white people pretending to be black.”

“It’s in the musical extravaganza part,” he said. “The whole idea is they’re bringing this show to this ski lodge to help the old man out, but he’s proud and he can’t know about it. They have to convince him he’s doing them a favour. Only Rosemary Clooney gets pissed off at Bing Crosby because she thinks he’s taking advantage, and the other two — whoever they are, the B-plot — get it completely screwed up and think they need to pretend they’re engaged or some damn thing, because the whole movie is just an excuse for the music and everyone will be exactly as stupid as they need to be…”

◈◈◈

“You should wait for Ann and Milo, maybe they know what it is,” Calliope said.

Maggie shook her head. “I am incredibly sure Ann and Milo don’t know about minstrel shows. They are really smart, but this isn’t smartness. This is the opposite of smartness. I just wanted to check everyone else just in case.”

“Do you want Barnaby…” Hyacinth executed a flawless verbal U-turn. “…no you don’t.”

Mordecai had been gazing up at the ceiling. He clapped his hands as if waking himself. “Wait! Wait! I know what it is! I didn’t know what it was when I saw it, but I get it now!”

He shook his head. “Well, no, I don’t get it at all. But when I saw it in the movie, I thought the little idiot was trying to pass. It’s in The Jazz Singer. I only remember it because I spent the whole thing staring at that coloured actor and trying to figure out if they painted him.” He waved a hand. “And it was a talkie, but the resolution was terrible. It sounded like he was singing with a mouthful of gauze. I said to the boys in the band, this is never going to catch on. Shows what I know.

“I read a newspaper interview about him later and it turns out he really was coloured, and somehow that was even worse. He made me ashamed of myself. You don’t flush your pretty little white girlfriend and your career in show business down the toilet to go home and suck up to a father who disowned you two times and a damp dishrag of a mother who didn’t do anything about it either time! It’s a fine line between devotion to family and absolute masochism, but I assure you, it is there!”

“I’m not hearing how this has anything to do with a minstrel show,” Maggie said.

“You’re taking a movie awful personally, Em,” Calliope said.

“Of course I’m taking it personally, it’s the first time I ever saw a coloured man playing a coloured man in a movie. It was a movie about me, and I don’t get to see a lot of movies about me, and they screw… they messed it up.”

Calliope frowned. “I don’t think they make movies about half-Wakokuhito Marselline girls at all,” she muttered.

“At least they don’t tell everyone you want to kill little white girls for their shoes,” Erik said.

“I’m half-white,” said Calliope. She looked away. “So does that mean movies are half about me?”

“The first time I ever saw black people playing black people in a movie was Gone with the Wind at La Stella,” Maggie said. “I was six.”

Mordecai winced as if he’d just burned his hand on the stove. “Okay, you win.”

“Win what?” Erik asked, blinking.

“An acting award from a segregated table at a hotel where they don’t allow black people,” Maggie said acidly.

Ann knocked on the kitchen doorway and cleared her throat. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to look shabby for your pretend birthday, Maggie.” She patted her hair with a smile. “What are we talking about?”

“Apparently movies are terrible,” Hyacinth said. “Send me a postcard when they do one about a lesbian. I don’t care how awful she is, I’m going to buy myself a bottle of champagne.” She waved a hand. “Or a boy who wears dresses, and I’ll buy one for Ann.”

Ann was still smiling but it had grown a bit twisted. “Oh. It’s called Glen or Glenda.” She sat down at the table and adjusted her dress. “We hate it.”

◈◈◈

He was marching in place with his hand held up in a salute. The furniture rattled. “…Then they all sing they love him, they looove him, da-da-da-da — I don’t remember. It’s the same one from the beginning. It’s heartwarming. Then there’s another big number about how civilian life sucks — I really can’t believe you’ve never seen this — and everyone dresses as Santa Claus, even the women, so they can do ‘White Yuletide’ and hand out these presents to these children they imported just for the ending. They don’t appear to have parents.”

He frowned. “Now that I’m thinking about it, it’s creepy. I have no idea what Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney are doing with a truckload of children.”

“Why didn’t they just make it snow?” said the General.

“I don’t think there was anyone older than eleven in the whole bunch.”

“No, not the children. The man is supposed to be in the military. Even if he is incapable of doing magic, someone under his command must have been competent. The ability to manipulate the weather is required for any modern military unit to be effective. If everyone is so anxious to help him, why didn’t they just make it snow?”

“I don’t know! I said they were all stupid. But that’s the whole thing and I don’t remember any black people in it, but there’s never any black people in anything. It’s not like they go out of their way. They don’t paint themselves up like clowns or try to be insulting. They play tambourines and tell jokes and sing ‘Mandy’ and it’s just cute. I thought it would be cute. It’s not unreasonable for me to think a minstrel show would be cute!”

“Was it cute?” said the General.

Sanaam slumped. “It… No. It was not cute. No.”

◈◈◈

“… so he paints himself black and puts on a wig and sings jazz. Apparently he does that in real life, too, and that’s why they wanted him for the movie. It’s a character he does. The newspaper article was written like he was doing everyone a favour, desegregating nightclubs and bringing white people music they wouldn’t listen to otherwise. I say if they don’t want any jazz, it’s not my responsibility to spoon-feed it to them. I’m sorry, Maggie. I did not hijack your symposium on purpose. Is that what a minstrel show is?”

“No,” Maggie said tightly. “No, they did not sing jazz and desegregate a nightclub. They sang ‘Turkey in the Straw,’ only it wasn’t.”

◈◈◈

“I should’ve known something was up when the ticket lady wouldn’t stop staring at us. She called her manager and they had a discussion about whether or not they wanted to let us in. But I thought it was just the theatre. They’re segregated in a lot of places in the ILV. I told Maggie to smile and look polite and play up the Marselline accent and we’d see.”

“Magnificent does not have an accent.”

“Everyone has an accent, and they like foreign black people better in the ILV. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen — and I live here sometimes. They cut us some slack when we start talking. It’s like they know they’re being stupid and they don’t want us to run back to our country and tell on them. If you’re from there, you don’t have anywhere else to go, and they don’t care.”

“These are the same people who produced Gone with the Wind, not to mention the institution of slavery which appears in it, are they not?” She had reopened the movie book, checking to see if that trash Maggie had consumed at a matinée was “culturally significant.”

Sanaam shrugged. “They can’t be the exact same people, it’s been a while…”

“Then they display an appalling ignorance of their own history and a lack of ability to learn!”

“I don’t think we have a leg to stand on there, sir, but may I finish explaining the results of my poor parenting before you run off to invade a country and force-feed them their history?”

“Apart from your ignorant decision to expose her to the drool of an idiot culture on purpose, is it significantly different from her experience with Gone with the Wind?”

He sighed. “Well, for starters, a man painted up like a deranged clown version of her father didn’t haul out a banjo and start playing one of her favourite songs with new lyrics designed to insult her specifically, live and in person, in Gone with the Wind.”

◈◈◈

“I defy!” She punctuated it by slamming her hand on the table. “I defy any of you sitting here today to give me a good reason I ought to be called a raccoon! It doesn’t even make any sense! ‘Magician’ is because I do magic. ‘Kaffir’ just means ‘infidel.’ ‘Nigger,’ ‘negro’ and ‘darkie’ are all about skin colour. I in no way put on a little black mask and gloves at night and steal people’s garbage! I have never once tried to wash cotton candy!” Erik was tugging on her sleeve. “What?”

“We steal garbage all the time.”

She pounded the table again, making him jump, “That’s not black people, that’s poor people! ‘Old Zip Coon’ is not a song about poor people, it’s a song about black people who are poor! And stupid!”

“Opposable thumbs,” Calliope said.

“What?”

“You both have opposable thumbs.”

Maggie regarded her own hand and tested the thumb. “Do raccoons have opposable thumbs, Calliope?”

“I’m not sure now. Chris has custody of the Spirit of Joy and I can’t check until he visits.”

“What?”

“I think Gary found the Spirit of Joy in the trash a long time ago,” Erik said absently. He had his grey eye closed and the metal one covered. “He fixed it up but he never sold it. It might have opposable thumbs, but that doesn’t mean raccoons do, Calliope. ’Cos it was broken in the first place and he didn’t have a real raccoon to look at. Chris found it, but he broke it again by accident and Milo fixed it with a sparkly collar that had ‘Joy’ on it. Now Chris is dragging it everywhere taking photos of it, and we’re not sure if he really does want to do an art installation of a stuffed raccoon or he’s just screwing with us. Enough already!”

He opened his eye with a scowl. “How many verses does this dumb song have? They won’t quit and I can’t pay attention to you with a music reel going in the background.”

“Try thinking about something other than raccoons,” Mordecai said.

“Try thinking about something other than a solid white zebra,” Erik said, eye closed.

Mordecai blinked and touched a hand to his forehead. “Shit. Oh, I’m sorry, Calliope.”

“I’m thinking of the Spirit of Joy riding a solid white zebra,” Calliope said, eyes closed.

Erik was banging his head on the table. “Gods, it’s catchy. Zip-a-doo-den, doo-den…”

“Don’t sing it, I don’t need to hear it again,” Maggie said. “I’m sorry. I have no idea how many verses it has, somebody pulled the fire alarm when he got to the one about how black people can’t run a country but we’re too dumb to know it.”

◈◈◈

“I understand. I really do. It was upsetting. I was upset too. Just, the magnitude of it. It’s not like this was a fluke, sir. Or a mistake. It’s not just the fact that they paint themselves up and insult us for a few hours for fun. It’s the existence of this whole monstrous thing, and we just got a glimpse of how big it must be to make people think that sort of behaviour is okay.

“I mean, I’m a tourist. I said that. But that means I’m insulated, and Maggie is too, a little. We can pick up and leave whenever we want, except we sort of can’t. We’re going to keep meeting that thing; different pieces of the thing, but it’s still the same thing.

“So I get why she did it, but I had to sit her down and explain that no, we can’t pull the fire alarm — not a literal fire alarm — about racism, because there might be a stampede and people could be hurt. Physically, not emotionally. Or killed. Killed in a different way from those lynchings I read about in the paper over there.” He put both hands over his face. “Gods, maybe pulling the fire alarm is the right thing to do. I have no idea how to handle this.”

◈◈◈

“I could not possibly have pulled that fire alarm. I don’t like what you’re insinuating. I never left my seat the whole time,” Maggie said. “No jury in the world would convict me, so there.”

◈◈◈

“Another black boy getting hanged from a tree didn’t even make the front page,” Sanaam said.

◈◈◈

“Black people are running a continent, you guys!” Maggie cried. “We’ve had empires! It doesn’t make any sense! Couldn’t they at least have the decency to make me feel horrible about myself for a reason that makes sense? Now every time I feel hurt by it, I feel stupid too. It shouldn’t hurt me because it’s stupid and they’re stupid, but it hurts me anyway. And they crapped up a perfectly good song about turkeys!”

“It’s funny the song is about turkeys,” Mordecai said.

“Yes!” Maggie swiped a hand across her eyes. “Turkeys are a funny animal! And not racist. That I am aware of. Please don’t tell me turkeys are racist, I can’t take it! I used to think raccoons were funny.”

Erik took hold of her hand and squeezed it. “Raccoons can still be funny, right?”

“I don’t know. Like I don’t know if I can still like the song.”

Mordecai concealed a smile with his palm and tried not to laugh. This was like when he had to explain poverty to Erik; he had to tiptoe past his cynical nature or it was going to go off, and the shrapnel would hit Maggie.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “Turkeys are a funny animal, but that’s not why I think it’s funny. I’ve got to explain, but I don’t want to laugh and hurt your feelings. We had a slogan during our revolution. We had a lot of slogans. We were very slogan-oriented, the newspeople loved it. But I distinctly remember putting this one on the side of the Chambers of Parliament in yellow paint. We used to say ‘Don’t Let the Turkeys Get You Down.’ ‘Turkey’ is another one of those substitutions, like ‘fish.’ We were shooting people in the streets but we didn’t want to be rude, I guess.

“‘Turkey’ diverged a bit, though. To us, a turkey wasn’t just a bastard — pardon me, Calliope, Maggie — but a stupid, obstructive one. A witless gear grinding away in a broken machine. A tool of the system. Those people who put on that show and crapped up your song are definitely turkeys, Maggie. And they frequently get a person down, that’s why we need a slogan.”

“I think the song was like that in the first place and someone un-crapped it,” Erik said. “Does that make a difference?”

“No,” Ann said. She shook her head. “Well, maybe it does, but not on your end, Maggie. You remember I said we hated Glen or Glenda? Well, we did. Cerise didn’t like it, either, but she knew I hated it, and she hid in my dressing room that weekend, and she leaped out from behind the folding screen and shrieked, ‘Pull the string!’ like the mad scientist in the movie, and that was brilliant. That was hilarious.

“I think we spent about a year hiding and screaming ‘Pull the string!’ at each other, and it was funnier every time. It was like ‘come out of the closet,’ in the dumbest way possible. An epidemic of mollies literally hiding and waiting to spring out at you.” She gave a light laugh. It trailed away when no one joined her.

“Well, maybe you don’t get it,” she said, “but I promise you, it’s funny. It’s still funny.” She smirked and shook her head. “And of course Pierre thought the damn movie was the funniest thing he’d ever seen, right out of the box, but he has an odd sense of humour. The point, and I do have one, is that we can’t stop people from making a thing that’s meant to hurt us, but if we want to, we can take it apart and put it back together again so it doesn’t hurt.”

“I don’t even think they were trying to hurt us, it’s like they didn’t even know it was hurtful,” Maggie said. “It feels even worse that way.”

“Ed Wood really likes dresses too, and he thought he was making a good movie,” Erik said helpfully.

Ann’s smile dissolved. She pitched forward and put her head on the table. “Oh, dear gods, Milo and I feel like Mordecai after The Jazz Singer. Ugh.”

◈◈◈

“Sir, for gods’ sakes, ‘groundbreaking’ doesn’t necessarily mean… I mean, Birth of a Nation is ‘groundbreaking,’ the damn thing was the longest movie ever and I think they invented the fade out… Sir, you cannot murder an idea. If you destroy the book, the library will charge you for a replacement. Brigadier General Glorious D’Iver! I love you very much, but we need to talk about your habit of ignoring problems when they get too big and focusing on these itty-bitty details that look solvable. You are not going to conquer racism on a trench-by-trench basis. All you are doing here is destroying the evidence. The crime is still in progress.”

“They gave it five stars!”

“Five stars?”

“Yes.”

“Gone with the Wind is better than White Yuletide?”

“Yes.”

Sanaam tightened his grip on the dust jacket, wrinkling the paper. “All right. I will throw the book out the window and you can blow it up, but it’s not going to solve anything. Then we need to get serious about this ‘post-racial society’ you think we ought to have.”

◈◈◈

Maggie frowned and planted a hand on her hip. “So is yelling ‘Pull the string!’ at each other still funny or not?”

Ann shook her head, frowning too. “It still is. It hurt again for a moment, but it’s still funny when we do it. That’s strange.”

Calliope put a consoling hand on her back. “It’s like when you call each other ‘trap.’ You love each other and you know how you mean it, so it’s okay. Nobody gets hurt. You don’t know what Ed Wood means, and a bunch of other people don’t, either, so he is hurting people and you don’t like that. It’s a violation of trust.”

“It’s okay if I say I’m a tentacle monster, because I am one,” Erik decided. “But if I say Diane is around other people, it’s not. Because they don’t know I’m a monster and she was one too and she started it.”

Mordecai shook his head. “She didn’t start it. She picked it up from people who’d like to hurt her with it and turned it around on them before they could. Like pulling a knife off a mugger and taking his wallet.”

“So let’s say I dress as a raccoon for Mischief Night,” Maggie said. “Is that funny?”

“I think not around here because nobody knows what it means,” Erik said.

“It might be like an inside joke for me,” Maggie said contemplatively.

“Pierre dressed as Patrick/Patricia from that movie for a costume party we had around Yule and Cerise threw his wig in the punch bowl, so I think there are limits and you have to know your audience, dear,” Ann said.

“So if I decide I still like the song, but I’m not careful about where I mention it, someone might pull the fire alarm and call me a turkey?” Maggie said. “Because of something some guy in clown makeup did to hurt me?”

They were all quiet and thought about that for a while.

“Well, I know you’re not a turkey, I wouldn’t,” Soup said. “Do you care what some jerk you don’t know thinks?”

Maggie looked crying-sad again. “Yes, because somebody I don’t know didn’t care about hurting me, and I’m not a turkey.”

“It’s not fair,” Erik said. “This isn’t your mess. You shouldn’t have to stop liking something that made you happy and be sad instead because some dumb guy with a banjo…” He trailed away, and his gaze drifted over Maggie’s left shoulder.

She sighed and made a gesture in the air, before dropping into a chair with a thump. “Some Invisible has an update for him, because I’m pretty sure I didn’t mention the banjo. I am really sorry, Erik. This isn’t your mess either. After you figure out how to make it find words, you need to teach that octopus in your head to poke gods in the eye.

“Hey, Erik?” It usually didn’t go on this long. “You okay?”

He was shaking his head.

Mordecai snatched his shoulders and spun him around and shook him. “Are they telling you about racism? They didn’t crush you with poverty, so now they’re going to drop racism on you? Dear one, can you tell me what it is? Please!”

“They told the kid about poverty?” Hyacinth said. “How is he still in one piece?”

“I told him about socialism,” Mordecai said.

“Oh. Great. Well, when they get done telling him about racism, you can tell him Cinderella.”

“For gods sakes, will you shut up?” said Mordecai. “This is not a good time! Erik, can you sing something? What about that song you wrote about the dog?”

Erik was still shaking his head.

Maggie’s voice was very soft, “Erik, did I break you?”

Erik put both hands over his eyes. He twisted his whole body sideways to get out of his uncle’s grasp. He screamed: (I don’t know what to do with this stupid information!)

They all saw it. It was as if someone plugged in a lamp in a dark room. A black man was rubbing even blacker paint on his face in a lighted mirror. He added a wide white smile, then he tugged on the white dress gloves, cocked his top hat to the side and picked up his banjo.

They all saw each other seeing it, shadows sketched faintly in the brown darkness at the edge of the flickering light, like the faded edge of a photo vignette.

Mordecai thought: (Ah-ha. He can’t get a job playing anywhere else because the nightclubs are segregated. Al Jolson must be slacking off on that.)

Ann and Milo were holding hands. Ann thought: (It’s like the Cakewalk. Pierre told us the Cakewalk was black people making fun of those goofy ballroom dances white people used to do, but white people didn’t get it. Like they were so dumb they didn’t think black people could dance any better.)

Milo pictured a ping-pong game. It appeared in the central space where they’d been looking at the man applying makeup before he left with the banjo. A black man and a white man, both of them in totally ridiculous makeup, were playing. The black man returned a volley, it bounced off the table and zoomed right past the white man without him even noticing.

Soup thought: (The guy makes more money this way than he can being real. Hell, I’d paint myself anyway you want for a hundred sinqs a week. Especially if everything else is in food service.)

Calliope thought: (Hey, he thinks the song is catchy too! Did you guys get that? He likes it better than ‘Swannee River.’ He thinks:) The words appeared in the darkness as if drawn with a sparkler: “Hell. I do a little shuck and jive and I can tell those damn fools I’m fixin’ to be president four days a week, with a chorus line of white folks backing me up, and they never catch on. Could be worse.”

Maggie thought: (Did you guys catch Cousin Violet nudging the schedule so we showed up on Moon’s Day when this guy was playing? I noticed that part.)

Hyacinth’s vague image was waving its arms and jumping up and down. She thought: (Did you guys notice we’ve become psychic? Is everyone okay with that except me? If this ever stops, I’m checking everyone for brain damage!)

Samantha thought: (Can we go back to the jar with the black stuff in it? I want to check it for pudding.)

Erik banged his head on the table again. Three times. Fast. The cord popped out of the socket and vanished in darkness. “I’m sorry,” he said, muffled. “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”

“Okay, I meant what I said about checking everyone,” Hyacinth said. She lifted one hand. “Bring that dog over here. Let’s go.”

Mordecai shook his head. “That was all surface stuff. Diane used to turn me inside out and shake me until my subconscious fell out for fun. I’m still fine.”

Hyacinth regarded him. She still had her hand up. “I will be checking all of you for melancholia, socialist tendencies and delusions of political competence while I’m at it.”

“You don’t know how to do that. You are not Diane. Sit down.” He put his hand on Erik’s back. “It’s all right, dear one. We’re okay. We’re sorry we upset you too. I get why you weren’t sure about telling. I’m not sure what to do with it either.”

Erik looked up at Maggie. “Mad… at… me?”

Maggie snorted and clamped both hands over her face. She leaned against the table, melting into a puddle of giggles. “The world is so stupid! Oh, my gods. The ping-pong ball bounced right past that white guy and nailed a little half-white girl in the back of the head, and she’s like, ‘Hey,’ but the black guy didn’t even know I was there. And I didn’t know he was there. I thought the white guy threw it. Meanwhile, the white guy is standing there, clutching his little paddle, and he’s all, ‘I do declare, the negro folk are just terrible at these here pings-and-pongs.’ I don’t care anymore. I can’t care. This is just a mess!”

Erik snickered. “‘Pings-and-pongs.’”

“Ed Wood hit me in the head with a ping-pong ball,” Ann said. She covered her laugh. “It was out of bounds, Ed!”

Soup was kneeling on the floor next to Samantha. “Hey, we don’t eat face paint. You know that? You get what I’m saying?” She licked his face. “Geez.”

Sanaam knocked on the kitchen doorway. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to… What’s going on?”

“Oh, nothing,” Maggie said. “It’s just impossible to tell who’s a tool of the system and who’s using the system as a tool, so I gave up. And we were briefly psychic but I’m sure it’s fine. What’s going on with you?”

“Ah,” he said. “Well, your mother and I were having a bit of a discussion. And, um, she got frustrated with the situation and jumped out the window. I have an idea she’s on her way to the Iroquoise Embassy uptown to straighten out their culture, but there’s a slight possibility she’s going to find the man who wrote The Reel Essentials and tear out his eyes. Oh, and I should mention, you’re not allowed off the boat the next time we visit the ILV, and neither am I.”

“You told her about the minstrel show.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure what to do by myself.”

“It’s okay. I wasn’t sure either. What do the ‘Real Essentials’ have to do with it?”

“It’s a book about movies and they gave Gone with the Wind five stars. Out of five,” he added. “I’m not sure if we ought to stop her. I mean, we probably can’t, but if we ought to try. I know I can’t, I’m not fast enough. Do you want to try, Maggie?”

Maggie considered for a moment, not very long. She shrugged. “Nah, let’s just hold off on dinner until she gets back. Can we do that, Uncle Mordecai? What’re we having?”

“I was going to make real food, but now I’m thinking let’s just get some pizza,” said Mordecai.

“Is it okay if we hit up the Patels’ deli?” Maggie said. “I want a specific sandwich.”