Let’s Eat Pizza on Pluto
Tracie Adams
I remove the damp towel from the bowl and punch my fist into the bubbly mound of pizza dough. As I drill my four young children on science facts, my hands massage the yeasty blob with the strong fingers of an experienced masseuse. “Okay, say it again, you got this. And this time without laughing about Uranus.”
My feisty seven-year-old daughter is the first to stand up, eager to impress her siblings. “My Very Earnest Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Ur… Ur… Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.”
She was the child who laid in the pickup truck parked in the sorghum field watching stars and meteors slice through the sky. She was the child who would one day drive eight hours, two states away, to stand on a rooftop for the best view of the eclipse. She was the child who would one day stop believing in dinosaurs, stop believing in God, stop believing me.
“Mom, they’re saying Pluto isn’t a planet. There are only eight now.”
I grab the newspaper from her hand to see for myself. And there it is in black and white, poor Pluto no more. “Well, that’s stupid. What will the very earnest mother serve?” I spit the words out like I’ve found a hair in my mouth.
“Nachos, mama. She will serve Nachos.”
The big round eyes are the same, and the long dark hair is her signature look that I would recognize anywhere. But this young woman standing in my kitchen is an enigma, like the scientist who downgraded Pluto to an icy lump, just another Kuiper Belt Object whatever that means. Is his mother standing in a kitchen somewhere at this very moment wondering who is this child?
I want to tell my daughter I’m sorry this mother-daughter thing has to be so hard. And how none of it makes sense because Pluto still orbits the sun. Still has sufficient mass to maintain its round shape. And oh my God, it was a respected part of a solar system for seven decades only to be canceled, its name removed from the treasured mnemonic once loved by every third grader, its value dwarfed and forgotten.
My hands twist a dish towel, my throat constricts with longing. There’s love in her eyes but her expression tells me there’s no going back. I want to tell her that sure, I like nachos too, but it still breaks my heart.
Tracie Adams
Tracie Adams is a retired educator and playwright who writes short fiction and memoir from her farm in rural Virginia. She is the author of the essay collection, Our Lives in Pieces. Her work was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in over sixty literary journals and anthologies including Cleaver, BULL, Frazzled Lit, Trash Cat, Brevity Blog, SoFloPoJo, Fictive Dream, and more. Visit tracieadamswrites.com and follow her on X @1funnyfarmAdams.