Mother lies in a puddle of equations, the puzzles she didn't solve before she died. Her body drifts apart, like fireflies lifting from a bush, losing that immutable solidity we all found so quirky and out of place.

Usually a man of harmony, Father paces with dissonance. He adored my mother. At every turn, he sounds a minor second. When he finally sits, the room fills with the discord of a tritone.

My little brothers sit together, one obtuse and the other acute. Their supplementary natures languish, and they're beginning to lose degrees. Next to them, my grandmother stretches lengthwise. She's pulled herself into a line pretending to run parallel, but we all know that somewhere in the distance she’s let herself converge with the floor. None of us say anything.

I’m not ready to say goodbye. I remember dancing along my mother’s form, sliding and careening into her lap, slipping along her warm smile. She called me her favorite little girl. I’ll miss her laughter, her eyes, the hum of her voice. Mostly, I’ll miss her stories about Tick Tock. During bedtime, she would describe the world where she grew up, telling fantastic tales to make us sleepy, but I never grew tired, hanging on every word, so exotic and peculiar. Tick Tock. I imagine my mother as a child there, dreaming of the day she would find us.

Mother stayed in our land of points and vectors until the day she died, but I believe a piece of her never left that distant place. Straddling two worlds, she discovered a harmony between them, a divine proportion that could never be found in either world alone. I’ve often wondered if I could find it.

A plan strikes me head-on, and I gather the courage to share it with my family. “I'm going to Tick Tock,” I say.

Father blurs into cacophony. My brothers gawk in disbelief.

“In fact, we're all going there,” I say. “We need to do this for Mom, and we need to do this for ourselves.”

“Not a good idea,” Father says. “We don't know anything about that place.”

“Of course we do. Mom told us all about it.”

Grandmother curves toward me and whispers into my ear. “Those were just stories.”

“Tick Tock’s real, and we can find it.”

Phil, the obtuse twin, speaks up. Jerome often lets Phil do the talking. “What will we do there?”

We need a quest, something to reach for. “We're going to get pancakes,” I say.

This had been one of my mother's most important stories. Breakfast. Eggs and bacon, orange juice and tea, and the sweetness of cereal. Most of all there were pancakes—golden, griddle-cooked, syrupy … things. I don’t know how they taste, what makes them so special, but Mother's face would light up with joy whenever she talked about them.

“It's dangerous,” Father says. “We could be separated in the Sea of Ideas. We might lose one another forever.”

The thought of losing anyone else is unbearable. I pause, and then the answer hits me.

“Not if we join ourselves with a common theme.”

Father looks at me for a suggestion, but the solution is obvious.

“Mother,” I say.

*     *     *
The Sea of Ideas seems infinite. It churns and surges against the shore. Father is right about the danger: We could all be separated and lose what's left of our family. I hold my brothers tightly.

Father resolves his dominant Seventh into a Perfect Fifth, and we’re immersed within his harmony. “Just keep thinking about your mother,” he says. “Hold the thought of her close, and we'll be safe.”

Wading into the current, we’re swept from shore; we rise on one side of a wave only to drop on the other. Over and over, we crest and fall. Deep within the troughs, we cough on theorems and hypotheses, sputtering philosophy and literature from our throats. On the crests, the horizon shimmers, distant and pale. Millennia of ideas surround us, and I’m gripped by a dreadful realization: I’ve lost sight of home. Fear surges over me; I rise through it and reach for Mother; the thought of her holds us together.

She told us the story of the day she found us. Having made her own journey across the Sea of Ideas, she woke on the shore of her new home. The golden ratio, an infinite string of numbers, had weaved through her. The thread started with 1.61803… then extended into …3988749…. Farther and farther it stretched into …8948482…. Never-ending, number after number fading into the vanishing point of her mind. The golden ratio had greeted her on arrival and, from that moment forward, had never left her.

Our mother survived the crossing, and so could we.

Exhausted and drenched, we reach the other side. We crawl onto the shore and into the daylight, but the savage Sun forces me down, hands over eyes, face to the ground. Darkness engulfs me, and the world goes black.

*     *     *
I wake to a harsh but bearable light. My father’s snore holds little harmony, and I turn to check on him.

Globs of matter cling to me. Gravity pulls me together and tugs me toward the ground. I have a body. Legs with knobby knees, fingers that curl and grasp, pigtails tied with long ribbons the same eggshell blue as the dress hanging around me. The sensation scares me, but it’s thrilling also. Having this body makes me feel closer to Mom.

This place is nothing but objects. Language has followed us from home, but now we have things to match the words. Yucca. Sagebrush. Arroyo. Horizon. They crowd me, exert their weight, demand my attention. A vireo sitting at a prickly pear weaves its song. A coyote in the distance snarls and yips. Even the smells are things, atoms filling the space around us and within us.

Father lies sprawled on the ground, unconscious. His arms and legs look lanky and awkward. A bebop goatee covers his chin. He wears horn-rimmed glasses now, and a tilted beret sits on his head. I shake him awake, and he springs into a slouch.

“Whoa!” He pats down his new body as if searching for smokes. “This is slated for Crashville, man.” He touches the beret, glasses, and goatee and seems pleased. “Crazy like a boss.”

Grandmother moves toward us in a string of S’s. She stops near my feet, coils into concentric circles, and gives her tail a shake. Tsck tsck tsck tsck tsck tsck tsck.

I don't understand, but I sense she’s unhappy. “Where are the twins?” I ask.

Grandmother slithers in a beautiful stream of diamonds towards a large clump of sagebrush. I follow her to a pair of plastic legs jutting from the leafy twigs. I give them a tug, and out pops Phil looking like a baby doll, his face frozen in a plastic smile; one of his blue eyes is painted too large.

“Phil! Are you all right?”

He holds his smile. Then I notice the ring on his back, so I give it a tug and pull on the string. When I let go, my brother says, “I’m stuck in place.”

I swallow my fear. Nothing seems right—too heavy, too bright, too solid. “Where’s Jerome?” I give the string a second pull.

“Inside the bush.”

I crawl under the leaves and find our brother. He has the body of a mechanical rabbit but the head of Sherlock Holmes, the one played by Basil Rathbone. A telephoto lens implanted into his eye peeks out from the rim of his deerstalker hat. It whirs into focus.

I set him upright, wind the key at his back, and start him in motion.

“My dear sister,” he says using the Queen’s English, “I feel as though I’m held in shackles.”

Grandma rattles her tail in agreement.

“We have bodies,” I say. “Just like Mom.”

I show them my hand and curl each finger in sequence. The motion creates a wave moving through pinky, ring finger, middle finger, pointer. We all stare at my fingers, mesmerized by their movement.

Jerome pulls out a magnifying glass from somewhere on his rabbit person and peers through the lens for a closer examination of my hand. “Notice how it occupies the space so that nothing else can exist there.”

I nod in agreement as I watch my fingers open and close. “And it exists in only one direction,” I say, “from then to now, but also pushing from now toward some-when, but actually just collapsing into now.”

“This is some crazy shit,” Father says.

“Elementary, my dear sir. In this world, time’s vector is constant.”

“We’ll get used to it,” I say, hoping to comfort, but I’m not sure any of us will ever feel right in Tick Tock. Everything in this world moves from here to there, first this then that. Jackrabbit. Tumbleweed. Red-tailed hawk. The motion of this world tilts forwards and back, side to side like a Tilt-o-whirl. My stomach sours.

“I want to go home,” I whisper.

Grandmother curves a line between my feet and moves into the landscape. She’s obviously not going back. Not yet. My family moves to follow her, and I take a last look toward home. I steady myself with a deep breath, then step into the desert.

*     *     *
Sweat stings my eyes. I lick my lips and taste the salt. Sunlight glints from metal as we shamble toward a campsite—a travel trailer just ahead. The twang of a steel guitar mixes with a reedy voice:

'Neath that desert sun in the western skies
Calling blue horizons gleaming in your eyes
Comes the lonesome rider through the desert sand
Passing sagebrush shadows in this rugged land

The trailer sits silver and rust in the middle of yucca. It's not alone. Two women, one dark and one light, sunbathe in bikinis on sun-shiny loungers. Their hands clasp together with the stillness of yin and the ardor of yang. They look up and smile.

“Welcome,” says the paler woman. “I'm Loralai, and this is my wife Avita.”

Since I'm physically most similar to Mother, we’ve agreed that I should do the talking. “Hello,” I say. “We're looking for breakfast.”

“Well,” Avita says, “there's a little diner up the road.”

“Up the road, you say?” Jerome’s tone sounds a bit fusty.

Avita giggles and reaches for Jerome’s rabbity fur, but he avoids her hand and takes the old briar pipe from his lips. “My dear woman, have you gone mad?”

Jerome pulls Phil’s string, and my brothers screech with laughter.

I step forward to get Avita’s attention. “Can we get pancakes at the diner?”

She nods. “It's not far from here. But y'all look hot and tired. Why not sit and rest?”

A collection of patio furniture sits around a fire pit, and we all take a seat. Loralai steps into her cowboy boots and walks into the travel trailer. A moment later she returns with a hookah. The radio plays along:

Under lonesome stars life can fall behind
You can find your heart, maybe lose your mind

Father’s eyes brighten at the sight of the hookah. “Now, this is the kicks.”

Avita takes his hand. “That's my hepcat. Come right over here, baby.” And she leads him over to a blanket spread out on the ground where Loralai has placed the pipe.

Grandma and Jerome follow my father. I hold up Phil; his frozen smile stares back at me. He’s in no condition to smoke a hookah.

The smoke is seductive, curling between us, around us, inside us, a balm for this harsh desert of uncompromising things where objects separate themselves, denying anything but the most surface familiarity. I inhale the smoke and find a comforting abstraction. The world of objects slips away, and I feel almost at home.

It isn’t until I notice the Sun on the other side of the sky that I remember we’re still in Tick Tock. How long have we been here? I ask the question, but I’m not sure I’ve said it aloud. I nudge Phil lying on his back, still smiling at me. I reach over and pull his string.

“Pancakes!”

My brother is right; we have to keep going. My head swims, and I fight to focus my thoughts. I set Jerome on his feet and wind the key at his back.

“We have to find the diner, brother. Wake the rest of the family.”

“My dear sister,” he says. “That may be easier said than done.”

Jerome isn’t making sense. “We need to go. Now,” I tell him.

He takes a pull on his pipe before speaking. “I have it in my mind that when you tell me we must leave, I should make a mark in the dirt beside me, just so.” He leans over and scratches a line into the soil with the tip of his pipe. “Seeing that there are six other such lines, I deduce this is not the first time we have had this conversation.”

I laugh. “We only came here this morning.”

“Then why has Father’s goatee grown so much longer?”

Jerome is right. The comfort of this place is holding us prisoner. I shake Father awake and call out to the others.

“Come on, Grandmother,” I say. “We have to find that diner.”

Loralai leans over and blows a stream of smoke into my face. I fall back into the lounger, slipping into dream.

Jerome pulls Phil’s string. “Mother.”

In my mind’s eye, she lifts me to her lap and strokes my hair.

Jerome pulls Phil’s string again, and then again.

“Mother. Mother. Mother.”

Loralai and Avita protest. They don’t want to let us go. Their allure is strong, tempting us with concept and notion, and I begin to weaken. They promise us reflection and rumination and comforting ideas. I take a step back toward the blanket, my heart battling my mind. I miss home.

It’s Phil who saves us. “Mother,” he says again. She is the theme binding our family, and the thought of her washes over us.

As if on cue, we all speak at once—Mother. The fog lifts above us, and we find ourselves free. We leave the camp together, letting the song fade behind us:

Ol’ coyote howls, mighty glad you came
As the days roll by, you’ll forget our names

Thistle and prickly pear rooted in soil, creatures both scurrying and flying begin to press closer and clutter my mind. Once again, we’re surrounded by things.

*     *     *
Twilight slides across the sky as we walk towards a fruity-pink horizon. At the side of the road, flames from a campfire splinter and peel in the chilled air. Three telescopes form an equilateral triangle on the edges of camp, and a man scrambles between two of them as we approach the fire.

“Hello, friends,” he says without looking up. “Welcome to the Church of Materialism.” He adjusts the focal knob.

The first telescope points toward heaven, where only the brightest of lights have appeared. Like everything else in Tick Tock, they have names—blue luminous giants, yellow dwarfs, Venus, Mercury, and Mars. The man stares through the eyepiece, still fidgeting with the knob.

“My name’s Newt.” He rushes over to the second telescope. Pointed below the horizon, this scope takes in a section of distant landscape. He bends to observe, turns the knob, adjusts the focus.

“Yucca,” he says. “Barrel cacti. Roadrunner.” He pauses and looks up at us to sing, “Tar-an-tul-a.”

He moves back to the first telescope and trains the lens on a different light. “Jupiter,” he says. “Magnitude minus two point two.”

“We’re looking for breakfast,” I say. “Do you know where the diner is at?”

“Of course,” says Newt, pointing down the road. “I see everything.” He motions me toward the third telescope, pointed at himself. “If you don’t mind, look through that eyepiece and tell me what you see.”

I move behind the scope and turn the focal dial. “I see you. Looking at the land.”

He exhales and holds as if he, himself, has come into focus. “We all need to look through the telescopes,” he says. “It’s going to be a long night.”

“We really can’t,” I say, still watching his magnified face. “We need to find the diner.”

His voice sounds exhausted. “But we have to maintain order, and I can pay you. You need money for breakfast, right?”

We all look at one another. We hadn’t thought about money.

Newt steps over to my father and hands him some bills. “This will get you breakfast, but afterwards.” He leads Father to the telescope pointed toward the land. “You keep an eye on the Earth.”

My father bends and looks through the eyepiece. “Like, crazy. I got some X-ray eyes.”

Newt moves toward Grandmother, but she’s quick to split the air with a tail rattle that stops him cold. He motions her toward the telescope pointing at the sky. “Please, if you don’t mind?”

Grandmother slithers over to peer through the lens. She gives a single rattle, letting us know she approves.

Newt flops into a folding chair in front of a blue-and-white cooler. “It’s been so long since I’ve had visitors, you know? Keeping an eye on things is hard work, and it’s endless!” He looks at the camping cooler sitting on the ground, rubs his fingers together, and then springs open the lid. “A sandwich.”

“Were you expecting something else?” I ask, looking at him through the telescope again.

“Not at all. It was always a sandwich. That’s my point.”

His munching mouth fills the view of my telescope. “But why are we keeping an eye on things?”

The giant blue orb of his eye shifts into view. It blinks with disbelief. “Superpositions must be destroyed,” he says. “Someone has to maintain the solidity of our universe.” He leans back and takes another bite of sandwich. “I observe, therefore we are.”

I motion across the landscape. “So, you’re the one responsible for all these things?”

“Absolutely not. They always were; they always are, and they always will be. Obliterating the myth of wave functions. I’m making sure we have a planet to stand on, a Sun to orbit, a galaxy to Milky our Way through.” Finishing his sandwich, he wipes his mouth of crumbs. “I do my part.”

“We need to find the diner,” I say looking up to leave.

Now it’s Newt’s turn to ask why. I decide to give him the easy answer. “Pancakes.”

“So much fuss over pancakes?” He screws up his eye and asks, “What are you really looking for?”

I stop to consider his question. Have we come here only for pancakes? My family watches me, waiting for my answer.

“I want to find my mother,” I say.

“You won’t find a better instrument to help you look than the Stargazer 360.” Newt taps on the end of the telescope. He looks excited to have solved our problem. “You’re standing behind one powerful telescope. You can find your mother with this.”

“But she’s dead,” I say.

“Then I’m sorry, but you’ll never see her again,” say Newt. “It’s all cause and effect, and the direction is always forward.”

Father sniggers at this, but Newt has given me an idea. It’s a matter of where the telescope is pointing in space-time. The past, the present, and the future. I look through the eyepiece again. My fingers manipulate the focal dial. Turning. Adjusting. Something begins to form from the blur. I reach up and fine-tune the diopter.

My mother slides into focus. A child, not much younger than I am now. She’s sitting on her bed, leaning into a pillow propped against the headboard. She has a book on her knees, but she isn’t reading. She’s staring past the pages and humming an unfamiliar tune. Beautiful and hypnotic.

“What do you see?” asks Newt.

When I take my eye from the scope, The dark landscape engulfs me. Looking back through the lens, I see her again, still daydreaming alone in her bedroom. This isn’t any better than a memory. I didn’t come to Tick Tock to see my mother, I came to find her.

“We’re leaving,” I say to my family. “We need to find the diner.”

“Your mother’s gone. Pay attention to what’s in front of you.”

I move away from the telescope and Newt takes my place. He swings the lens around to point at Father. My dad drops to his knees, groaning with heaviness and pain.

“What’s wrong with him?” Panic rises in my voice. “What are you doing?”

Dad curls up. He rolls in anguish. Grandmother rattles and coils to strike.

Newt swings the telescope around and points it toward her, fixing her in his magnified gaze. She writhes and loops along the ground.

“Stop it!” I scream. “You’re hurting them.”

Newt pulls the telescope up and away. Grandmother and my father lie panting on the ground; gravity overpowers them.

“I thought so,” Newt says, a smirk at his lips. “You’re all a bunch of thoughts and ideas hiding in bodies.”

“Leave us alone.”

Newt swings the telescope around toward me, but he doesn’t look through the lens. “It’s merely the weight of observation,” he says. “If you want to leave in the morning, you had better help me tonight.”

Jerome has been silent but now steps over, mumbling past the pipe clenched in his teeth. “I say, my good man. What’s this all about?”

Newt knocks on the tube of the telescope. “This is about Materialism.”

Jerome removes the pipe from his mouth and motions toward the landscape. “There’s more to the universe than particles.”

“Nonsense,” says Newt. “Force divided by acceleration will give you mass. Always. There is only that.”

“What of the in-between spaces?” I ask.

“It’s nothing.”

Jerome chuckles. “You see, but you do not observe.”

“It’s where we come from,” I say.

Newt shrugs. “Your family is nothing more than shadows on a cave wall. You don’t count until you’re seen, smelled, heard, and felt.”

Jerome’s voice reveals a passion uncharacteristic of his Holmesian nature. “Madness,” he says. “You’re removing the observer from the observation. All of these things depend on the mind.”

I hold up a hand to calm my family. “My mother used to tell us about visits to her grandfather,” I say. “During summers she would explore the land behind his house. The earth sloped down to the railroad tracks running parallel to a river. There was an old barn down there with missing planks that allowed light to seep inside and split the shadows. The dirt floor lay covered with books, old cloth and leather-bound tomes scattered like fallen sparrows.”

I let myself slip into the memory of our mother’s story, which she always told with detail and reverence.

“Words filled the books with mysterious incantations. Spells to create new worlds. Words strung into an endless sentence, a line where earth met sky. Flowers and trees sprang like phrases from the soil. Creatures heavy with verbs and adjectives crawled along the land. Canyons cut into prairies with the slow drip of a single paragraph.”

I swallow hard at the thought of my mother sitting in that sacred space. “She would slip between the lines, finding life within the story, but also aware of herself sitting in the barn, breathing the fine dust floating through shafts of sunlight. She watched herself move through the pages—at the same time both character and reader. It was her mind that held her position in time and space.”

I stare straight into Newt’s eyes, holding his attention with a story that describes the essence of my mother.

“Within that barn, she learned to move herself to other times and other places, and more importantly, she learned to imagine a place existing outside of her world. And that’s how she found us. And we’re as real as anything you can see with your telescope. And perhaps no different.”

I glare at Newt, challenging him with the truth. “You have no power over us, and you can’t hurt us. My mother is waiting at the diner, and I will find her.”

While I have been talking, my family gathered around me. We step back onto the road stretching through the desert. Newt offers no objection. No barrier. He shifts from telescope to telescope, naming his existence as I turn away.

“The moon—.2 lux and showing the Sea of Tranquility. A clump of rabbitbrush next to a coyote calling through the night. . . .”

*     *     *
The sign outside the diner buzzes and pops in pink neon letters. The Flying Cow. Below the name, blue tubes outline a saucer-shaped spaceship. Four rays reach toward a painted pasture, and a bright pink cow lifts from the ground.

I read the sign with excitement. It promises, Good Food. “I can’t believe we made it.”

Inside, most of the tables sit empty. Stirring his cup of Joe, an old man hunches over the counter, his back turned toward a couple of teenagers giggling over a cell phone. The only other people in the place are a fry cook wiping down the order counter and the waitress daydreaming near the kitchen door. We stand at the entrance, and everybody stops to look up.

I feel awkward, like only an object can, but we’ve come too far to turn back now. I step forward.

“This is a family restaurant,” says the cook, waving his spatula.

“We are a family.” I sigh and relax. “Mother told us about pancakes, and we’re here to try them.”

The waitress cocks her head to check behind us. “Where’s your mother, darlin’?”

I pull Phil’s string.

“She died,” he says.

Everybody looks away. The cook wipes the counter. Music from a jukebox fills the space between us.

“Sit where you like,” says the waitress.

It’s easier to take a seat without everybody watching. We take the booth beside the window. The neon lights spill pinks and blues onto the tabletop. I sit on the bench and shift over to let Father sit next to me.

“This place is in orbit,” he says, giving his approval. He looks toward the jukebox, bobbing his head with the beat.

Across from us, Grandmother has coiled between Phil and Jerome. Her tail rattles rhythmically to the music.

More than any time before, we’re surrounded by objects, squeezed between benches and table, pressed beneath a water-stained ceiling hiding the stars. The linoleum floor squeaks with the waitress bringing menus and water. She sets them on the table for Father and me.

“We need three more glasses of water,” I say.

She grunts and nods. “You got it. Name’s Ruby. I’ll be right back.” She steps away and walks toward the kitchen.

Father places our money on the table in front of us as Ruby walks back with the three glasses.

“I’ve been out here alongside the tumbleweeds and coyote a long, long time,” Ruby says. “A lotta odd people have passed through that door, but I ain't never seen nothing the likes of you.”

We stare back at her for a long moment, not sure what to say. But I’m glad she ain’t never seen nothing the likes of us.

“What'll you have?” she asks.

“Pancakes,” I say. “With maple syrup, please.”

Turning her head toward the cook, she yells out, “Five Blowout Patches.” She picks up the menus. “Your stacks will be right out.”

When the order arrives, my senses explode. Three round, golden cakes on each plate. I can smell the warmth rising from them, and the yellow butter melty-slides along the top. We pour out the syrup and watch it run over the cakes.

My father looks at me. “You first. You brought us here.”

I take a bite. The spongy sweetness fills the front of my mouth. Soft, doughy, warm—the pancake spreads over my tongue and somehow connects my head and heart. The syrupy sweetness fills the moment, and everything falls away. Something within the flavor, the smell, the texture. I stop chewing, trying to work it out.

It’s Mother. I can taste her, the part of her she left behind.

“There you are,” I say.

Everyone takes a bite. Even Phil lies face down in his plate. By the time we finish, we’re each a sticky mess. Syrup on faces and fingers, paws and rattles.

Ruby walks back to the table, shaking her head. “Now here’s a family that knows how to eat. I like that.” She picks up Phil and wipes him off, carefully setting him next to Grandmother. She stacks the dishes, but a pancake remains on mine, and I’m holding onto the plate.

“There’s nothing like a good meal to lift your spirit,” Ruby says, “to ease the pain of all those atoms falling through empty space.”

“It’s everything I imagined,” I say.

Grandmother and the twins lean back in the booth, looking content. Father rubs his stomach and smacks his lips. “Skeetle-at-de-dat-day.”

Ruby smiles. “Your mother liked pancakes?”

I nod and smile back.

“Well, I’m sure you must all miss her, but enjoying her favorite food is a fine way to ease the loss.”

She’s right, I feel better. “Thank you.”

Ruby picks up the money from the table. “This should just about cover it. You folks have a nice evening,” she says and steps away.

Father smiles and rubs his hands together. “Time to head home.”

Everyone seems excited to get back. It’ll feel good to trade permanence for possibility. But now I understand a little of how Mother must have felt. I think part of me will stay behind also, keep Mom company.

My family stands to leave, but I ask my father if I can have a moment longer. He nods, and they walk to the door and step out into the night.

Even here in the land of objects, imagination survives. There’s a place for dreamers. I know it. My mother’s own dreams led her to other shores, brought her right to us.

I close my eyes, and the hardness of this place softens. I slip into the dream that exists between here and home. I’m still in the diner, but it’s someplace more. The room smells of hot griddles and coffee. I sit quietly, listening to the song on the jukebox:

In my heart, I knew I couldn’t stay
I close my eyes, and the world just melts away

I scoot over, making room on the bench. Mother slips in beside me. She smells like a perfect number. Six. The missing member of our family.

“Hi, sweetie,” she says.

“Hi, Mom. I miss you.”

“I'm here.” She smiles and runs her long fingers through my hair.

I lean in closer, and we both pick up our forks.

“It looks delicious,” she says, staring at the plate with eyes that sparkle.

I watch her, never wanting to look away. We take one last bite, laughing at the spongy sweetness on our tongues. I swallow and let the moment sink down deep. It occurs to me that I can make this moment last forever. Mother and me in an infinite string.

I look up at her and think, 1.61803…

Tenderly, she kisses my cheek, then whispers in my ear, …3988749. . .