Chapter One Hundred and Nineteen
Madame Lapin-Défunt kissed Mademoiselle Godefroi on the top of her head while the latter sat at the desk in her little room, sewing.
“They’ll be neither one nor the other,” Annette explained. “They’ll be something new.”
The ladies had shorn their hair; Annette had binned all of Petunia’s cosmetics; and they had taken to refraining from shaving any part of their bodies. Now, Annette held up the first fruits of her new career as an avant-garde designer: two unclassifiable suits, lacking clear reference to either masculine or feminine convention.
“Promise me,” Annette beseeched, taking her lover’s hand, “we’ll never be gendered again.”
“Genderless,” spake Petunia, “forever. I vow.”
They closed their eyes, and kissed, and were transplanted back to Eden, the snake trod underfoot, the apple rotting uneaten in the grass, Adam tumbled somewhere below. The river of humanity had forked into two, an unreconstituted Babel, in our sorry corner of the multiverse; but here, in their new beginning, all such difference would be forsworn.