Dance, Dance, Dance, Amy

A Transgender Mythology Romantacy

A Lamur, GA, USA Novel

Chapter Twenty-Three: Mother’s Counsel

By Gail Rose Landers

Chapter Twenty-Three: Mother’s Counsel

[Friday Day Twenty-Two of the Enchantment]

Morning slipped into the house like a guest with good manners—soft-footed, carrying light. Denise sat at the kitchen table in an oversized tee, fingers curled around a mug whose steam had long since become comfort more than heat. The ache in her body had faded to a lived-in tenderness, not pain; the ache in her mind was a shape she now knew how to put a frame around. Patricia set down a plate—a bagel halved and buttered, apple slices fanned like a sun—and took the chair across from her as if they were about to play cards they both already knew how to count.

“Sleep?” Patricia asked gently.

“Like someone guarded the door,” Denise said. “Thank you for being on the couch.”

“Thank you for letting me,” Patricia said. She tore a bagel piece and considered it. “Today is for talking. Before the next gate.”

“About Erida,” Denise said, and the name no longer made the air taste like coins; it just put the right label on the right drawer. “About how she codes harm as romance and writes rules no boy has to follow.”

Patricia nodded slowly. “Her enchantment is a liar that speaks in old sentences,” she said. “It flatters a girl’s loyalty and turns it into a leash. It sells pleasure to boys as if consent were implied by proximity. And then it hides a trap in biology and calls it fate.”

“The pregnancy loophole,” Denise said, steady because steadiness counted. “If we get pulled across that line, the spell becomes permanent. She wants bodies to make her nest.”

Patricia’s jaw tightened, the way it had the morning she’d learned to change a tire because no one had stopped to help. “She’s using human rules against human girls in the oldest way,” she said. “I remember theories in seminars that treated our bodies like symbols. The Circle women I knew kept making us write the symbol back on our own skin.” She breathed once, to keep from spitting the next sentence. “I am grateful beyond speech that you said no. I’m grateful your doctor gave you paper to stack against a liar. I’m grateful you made a lock out of a vow.”

Denise half smiled. “Abstinence for spite,” she said. “Not a sermon. A strategy.”

Patricia’s laugh arrived cracked and whole. “Most good vows are both.” She leaned her arms on the table and angled slightly, the conspirator posture of two women sharing a marrow-deep truth. “I never told you the whole of my college circle,” she said. “Because you didn’t need the map then. Now you do.”

Denise sat up, hunger prickling, the good kind. “Tell me.”

“We were five,” Patricia said. “A poet, a scientist, a flutist, a girl who could fix engines by listening to them, and me. I wasn't like those other cis-girls then but we learned a transgirl can have power too and they kept my secret which made us even more powerful. That was until there was a need that I told you about before in college and we met that need in the circle just like what happened to you."

"That's when I was born. There was no Erida or perversion of the circle. Just you and Daddy being able to really share the closeness you two had always felt in a new way. The love was able to turn from a secret that you protected you both from persecution into the physical intimacy which was the most natural way to express that love. With that act you became my mother and your body finally matched your soul. I miss Daddy and I love you both. Momma please go on and tell me about when your circle." Denise added while touching her mother on the shoulder.

"We weren’t witches, not in the storybook sense. But we learned what the old women meant by circle. Not candles and Latin—though candles help and Latin keeps some people out. We meant: agreeing to be the reason each other said no when the world tried to make yes the only sentence. We learned dream wards from a dorm mother who knew too much about boys and football seasons. We learned the trick of naming the thing at the door before opening it. We learned to salt thresholds with laughter and pepper them with stubbornness. And once, when a hunger with a pretty face came into a party, we learned to stand back to back and look it in the eye until it blinked first.”

Denise pictured it and felt the echo of last night’s circle hum along her bones. “Why didn’t you bring me this sooner?” she asked, no accusation in it, only the ledger of time.

“Because I thought my job was to keep you in the ordinary long enough to get your feet under you,” Patricia said simply. “And because I hoped you could be a girl without having to be a soldier. I was wrong about the timing. I wasn’t wrong about you.”

Denise reached across the table and took her mother’s hand. “You weren’t wrong about the circle,” she said. “I have one. It looks like a pep band and a coach and a door that opens into a sanctuary and two women who argue about parking while saving the world.”

Patricia squeezed. “Then listen: magic—or Majick, as Dr. Ariel says it with that little j like a pin—works hardest where we are tired and asleep. It looks for dream-doors and the seams of the day. Guard your nights as if they were gates. Guard your mornings as if they were armor. Write your name on your pillow in breath. Don’t bargain with shadows. Don’t fall in love with the part of you that hurts in a pretty way.”

Denise nodded, feeling each instruction sit where it needed to. “I’ll lock the dream-doors,” she said. “And I’ll hand the keys to mortals I trust.”

Patricia lifted a brow. “Mortals?”

Denise’s smile tilted. “I’m starting to suspect not everyone in our contact list is strictly that.”

The house’s quiet shifted—the now-familiar way air rearranged itself when certain women stepped through a threshold. Francine knocked her knuckles on the back door twice and let herself in on the third because that was the rhythm of trust. Dr. Ariel followed, wind-threaded and precise; Celia Love came behind, less a footfall than an arrival of rootedness. Richard hovered at the kitchen’s edge uncertain, flowers in a grocery sleeve like a boy in a movie who’d taken notes.

“Come in,” Patricia said, and the room did what rooms do under good leadership: it adjusted to hold more people without anyone feeling smaller.

Francine looked Denise over with the coach’s eye—checking shin angles, scanning for hidden flinches—and nodded once, satisfied. “You look like sleep,” she said. “Good.”

Richard stepped forward, awkward brave. “I brought…these,” he said, and the flowers were humble and wrong-footed and perfect. Denise accepted them and set them in the sink with a glass. He hovered within arm’s reach, not touching, the lesson of the week made muscle-deep. “I’m here to help,” he added, and managed not to make it sound like a line-reading.

Ariel put her hand flat on the refrigerator door once, an absentminded ritual that likely told her everything about the house’s thresholds. Then she turned, attention entirely on Denise and Patricia. “You asked for counsel,” she said. “And you asked for truth.”

“We’ll take both,” Patricia said dryly. “In that order.”

Ariel’s mouth tipped at the corner, conceding the field to clarity. “This begins as counsel,” she said, “but ends as truth so naked it will need new clothes.” She glanced to Celia, who stood with her hands in her pockets, looking like an oak tree pretending to be a person and not getting away with it. “There’s something you should see as what it is, not what it pretends to be.”

Celia smiled with her eyes. “Here we go,” she said, amused without mockery.

Ariel stepped forward, and the light in the kitchen…answered. It wasn’t a trick of bulbs or a cinematic cue; it was the house itself acknowledging the question she had asked of it and the answer it would carry. Her voice did not swell. It refined.

“I am not only a liaison,” she said. “I am an avatar—a vessel shaped with consent for an older line. Hera walks through my work when the work is hers.”

The name did not thud. It resonated. Denise felt it touch the places in her that had gone rigid and softened them without making them smaller. Hera, not as a punchline from a textbook or a villain in a romance, but as architecture: covenant, keeping, the law that holds roofs over heads and spits on those who would call theft love.

Patricia’s eyes shone the way they did when a student finally heard the music in algebra. “That’s why you care more about rules than winners,” she murmured.

“And why I am most dangerous when promises are at stake,” Ariel said, neither apologizing nor posing. “I have been working in the threshold between mortal order and old obligation for longer than my hair says. I open doors that ought to be opened and close those that ought not to be. It is useful to have a budget and a title for that. It is truer to say: I serve.”

Celia, still leaning with lazy grace against the counter, lifted a hand as if answering a roll call. “And I am what I look like,” she said, grin curving. “A tree that learned to walk. A Dryad with a city address. An avatar of Aphrodite when the work is hers—her oldest face, not the sugar-coated one. Not seduction as a sport. Not jealousy dressed in sequins. Love that has bones. Desire with consent or not at all.”

Richard swallowed audibly. Patricia smothered a smile.

“That’s why you can look a room full of girls in the eye and make them remember they are the ones choosing,” Denise said softly.

Celia’s gaze warmed. “That, and I like a good bun,” she said, twinkling toward Francine’s hair. “But yes. I carry the part of love that builds instead of devours. I pin ribbons to keep them from turning into nooses.”

Ariel inclined her head toward the space between them. “We do not say this lightly,” she added. “Names have consequences. But you need to see who has asked you to carry what. And you need to meet them where introductions are proper.”

“Agape Duro,” Denise said, breath catching on the recognition. “An audience.”

“With Hera and Aphrodite,” Ariel confirmed. “Under rules that protect the mortal and constrain the divine.” Her eyes crinkled as if at a private joke. “There will be tea.”

Francine clapped her hands once, the way she did before every run-through. “Then we move,” she said. “Bags, shoes, phones. Richard, you’re third in line. If you wander, the Dryad will tie you to a chair with your shoelaces.”

“Willingly,” Richard said, managing a grin that didn’t try to be bigger than his fear.

They went as a unit because that’s how you promise not to lose anyone. Agape Duro received them with the now-familiar shift of air and the milk-light glow that made people breathe slower without knowing why. Matron Lila nodded as if she’d expected this guest list before anyone had texted her. She opened the inner door with the respect of someone whose grandmother taught her to curtsy without ever calling it that.

The audience hall was neither throne room nor chapel; it was a place built for conversations that could change where the river ran. The ceiling arched like open hands. The floor was ringed in etched circles that didn’t shout at the eye but held the feet steady. At the far end, two stations of presence clarified out of the room’s attention rather than appearing by entrance.

On the left, where a hearth would be, a figure stood with the kind of stillness that makes buildings last—dark hair braided and bound, garments plain and astonishing as geometry, a band at the brow that was not decoration so much as designation. She was not tall by measurement but taller than the room by definition. Her gaze held the weight of vows kept and hands unshaken. One did not kneel to her. One straightened.

On the right, against a lattice of living green that had no business thriving indoors and did, a figure stepped from leaf-shadow like a melody stepping from silence. Hair like copper beech, eyes with a thousand shades of laughter and grief, wrists circled with nothing that jingled and everything that held. She was not the cartoon on greeting cards or the excuse men use. She was a promise and a knife, a kiss and a locked door. One did not swoon to her. One consented.

Ariel stood a pace forward and then to the side—the posture of an officer introducing equals. Her voice gentled without losing clarity. “Lady,” she said to the left, and Denise felt the word settle in her bones like a foundation. “Beloved,” she said to the right, and the word rang like a bell that makes people turn toward their own names.

“Daughter,” said Hera—no thunder, no theatrical echo; only the kind of voice that turns arguments into oaths. It took Denise a heartbeat to realize Hera had aimed the word at her.

“Child,” said Aphrodite, and Denise felt her cheeks heat with the precise blessing of being seen neither as property nor as prey.

Patricia’s hand pressed into the small of Denise’s back, grounding and releasing in one motion. Denise stepped forward into the nearest circle. Francine flanked her like a standard-bearer. Celia moved to Aphrodite’s side with the ease of a hand returning to its wrist; Ariel returned to Hera’s shadow and did not diminish there.

“Speak,” Hera said, not as a command but as an invitation to finish a sentence the world had kept trying to interrupt.

Denise did not write a speech in her head. She spoke the simple truth of the kitchen and the clinic and the storeroom. “Erida’s spell is sexist,” she said, and the word did not sound like a think piece; it sounded like a charge under the law. “It makes girls’ loyalty a leash. It makes boys’ appetites a rite. It sets a trap in our wombs and calls it holy. It uses shame to keep its nets from being seen. We are cutting threads. We are saying no. We are moving our own. But we need authority loud enough to be heard where she has made herself comfortable.”

A smile like a small dawn touched Hera’s mouth. “Clarity is not a weapon too many carry,” she said. She lifted a hand and the air paid attention. “Come here.”

Denise stepped forward until she felt the faint pressure at the rim of the inner circle, then through it, each inch like stepping from shade into sunlight on purpose. Standing within arm’s reach of a god is less about awe and more about calibration—the body adjusting its instruments to a frequency it was made to hear and rarely gets.

Hera extended her right hand. “Do you serve from choice,” she asked, and the question was not loaded with danger. It was loaded with freedom.

“Yes,” Denise said, and felt each letter hit its mark, internal and external. “I choose to keep doors locked that should be locked and open those that should be open. I choose to be a place where consent is the law.”

“Then be mine,” Hera said, and placed her palm, warm and human, against Denise’s brow. Power moved—not a lightning strike, not a Hollywood glow, but the steady flood of an oath finding a body that accepted it. Denise felt the architecture of rules settle into her like a scaffold she could climb instead of a cage she had to escape. The key at her throat warmed to comfort and consequence.

“Priestess,” Hera said, simple as a job title, irrevocable as breath.

A sound like leaves laughing shifted behind her. Aphrodite had stepped near, joy in her eyes as if this pleased an old bet. “Oh, she’ll be trouble in all the best ways,” she said, delighted. “May I?”

“Please,” Hera said, and the word between them carried millennia of grudges and reconciliations like a cake carries layers—held together because someone finally decided to stop dropping it.

Aphrodite cupped Denise’s face in both hands, palms cool as river stones. “You are not a lure,” she said, each word a petal with a blade behind it. “You are not a prize. You are not a favor owed. You are a yes that belongs to you, and a no that belongs to you, and a joy that can be offered or withheld as you wish and never stolen again. I bless your refusal. I bless your pleasure when you choose it. I bless the laughter that starves hungers that only know how to eat.”

Where Hera had been architecture, Aphrodite was articulation—edges kissed into existence, boundaries turned to red string tied around a wrist so no one could say they hadn’t seen it. Denise’s triquetra flared against her sternum—not burning; brightening. When Aphrodite’s touch lifted, the phrase that rose unbidden in Denise’s mind was almost funny in its practicality: now men will have to read the instructions.

Aphrodite laughed aloud, throwing her head back. “Yes,” she said, eyes dancing. “Make them.”

Hera angled her head toward the gathered circle—Francine steady as iron, Patricia fierce as bread, Richard wide-eyed and upright, Julie coiled and grinning, Matron Lila calm as a harbor, Celia and Ariel standing where root meets law. “This does not end at one priestess,” she said. “This is not a coronation. This is a commissioning.”

Aphrodite stepped to stand beside her, shoulder to shoulder, old myths rewritten by posture. “We empower all who stand in this room and all you bring with you,” she said. “Consent is our altar. Courage is our incense. Humor is our weapon. Community is our shield.”

Hera lifted her hand. “Come,” she said, and the circle moved as one, because that is what it had been practicing all along. They stepped into the inner ring—Patricia blinking tears she didn’t wipe, Francine lowering her head a fraction as if before a starting gun, Richard swallowing and squaring his jaw, Julie whooping under her breath and then biting it back because reverence is a language too.

Hera touched each brow with two fingers, leaving no mark visible and a mark indelible. Aphrodite touched each wrist, fingers light, as if tying on a bracelet only souls could see. When she reached Richard she grinned, half-mischief, half-benediction. “You will be the boy who asks twice and hears twice,” she said. “That is not weakness. It is rarity. Wear it like a letterman jacket.”

Richard flushed, then stood taller in a way no team win had ever taught him.

Patricia received Hera’s touch with the dignity of a woman who had paid dues to mothers who never wrote their names on the minutes. Aphrodite’s fingers at her wrist made her laugh once, sharp and surprised. “For your stubbornness,” Aphrodite said. “May it never be sanded down to make anyone else comfortable.”

Francine’s brow-touch rang like a struck bell. “For guardianship,” Hera said. “You keep bodies upright and make souls brave without demanding dramatics to prove it.” Aphrodite’s touch at her wrist was sly and kind. “And for knowing the difference between spotlight and searchlight.”

Ariel and Celia did not bow. They did not need the blessing; they were conduits. But Hera met Ariel’s eyes, and between them went an exchange that could have footnotes. “Budget approved,” Hera said dryly.

“Pins polished,” Aphrodite added to Celia, who snorted.

The air steadied, which is what happens when power has gone where it ought and refuses to slosh. The room did not ring with commands. It breathed with a charge.

“Erida,” Hera said, and the name sounded smaller here than it had in kitchens and corridors. “Bring her.”

“Not to humiliate,” Aphrodite added. “To judge. Not to make a show. To end a theft. Her hunger is not a woman. Do not confuse the two.”

“Capture her vessel without breaking the person who carries it,” Hera said. “Deliver both—the hunger bound, the vessel tended—to this threshold. I will take jurisdiction. She will not slither back into your school’s shadows.”

Aphrodite’s gaze softened and sharpened in the same beat. “You may feel pity when you look into the eyes of whoever she is wearing. Give it to the person. Not to the thing. Mercy belongs to the living. So does rage.”

Denise bowed—not low, not groveling; the bow of an athlete before a relay. “We accept,” she said. “We will not let her feed on our shame. We will not feed her our spectacle. We will bring her, bound by consent and skill.”

“Good,” Hera said. “Then go eat. Plans that require righteousness go better with carbohydrates.”

Aphrodite laughed like a bell and like gossip and like prayer. “And when this is done,” she said, tipping her head toward Denise, “we will talk about dresses with pockets. Power likes a place to put its hands.”

Denise laughed, dizzy with relief and a strange, clean joy. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, and did not mind the ma’am at all.

Back in the outer hall, the ordinary world reassembled around them: tea pushed into hands, chairs taken, a clipboard produced from nowhere because Julie had thought of something. The empowerment did not make their feet leave the ground. It made the ground under their feet remember it loved them.

Patricia pulled Denise into a hug that was two parts pride to one part terror and all parts love. “You’re a priestess,” she said into her daughter’s hair. “I raised a priestess.”

“You raised a girl who keeps showing up,” Denise said, muffled but clear. “The titles followed me home.”

Richard hovered until Celia crooked a finger at him—come, stand, be counted—and he joined the cluster without being foolish enough to press. Ariel touched the doorjamb, a private ritual that had become familiar, then looked back to Hera’s sealed threshold with a soldier’s satisfaction.

Francine clapped twice, soft, the signal they all knew. “We hydrate,” she said. “We rest in shifts. We guard our dreams. We trust our allies with car payments and eyebrows, not with our minds. We show up at midnight with our shoes tied and our names ready. We bring her.”

Denise put her palm flat over the triquetra at her sternum, felt it answer, then let her hand fall to the key, which warmed like agreement. She would guard her dreams. She would take help only from mortals where minds could be moved, because that was where choice stayed clean. She would keep saying no until no was a door and then a wall and then a law.

“Together,” she said, not loudly, not for a poster—just for the people in the room who had earned the word. And they answered, a ripple running through them like a net tightening at the right moment.

“Together,” they said.