pluto (disambiguation)
merrik Moriarty
I. originally, order.
Once upon a time, I tried to categorize my life. This started, as many of my endeavors do, with a notebook—a flimsy, flat thing this time, the cover marbled pastel pink and cheap, worn gold. The pages were rounded at the corners and full of blank promise, the inside cover marked with a printing company’s mantra about creativity. I sat cross-legged on my bed one morning when I was thirteen and printed the date on the first page, down to the time. Underneath it, the title of the journal, Book of Lists.
My first attempt to corral the world onto paper, in blue ballpoint pen and smudging pencil, laid out in page after page of neat numbered columns:
My Favorite Book Characters,
Things Mama Talks To Us About,
Made Up Country Names,
Random Objects,
The Best Planets,
Piano Songs,
Things That Make Me Want To Cry.
This organization was because I am an oldest child, and therefore predestined to be nitpicky and sensible. It was because I’m an old soul, as told by my mother, and because the arrangement of the solar system at the time of my birth influenced me to be cold, reasonable, and a little eccentric. It was because I was tired of the fantasy worlds crawling around in my brain, shedding characters and currencies and magical creatures, and I needed somewhere to put the tangled thoughts tumbling constantly alongside them—that is to say, because I’m a writer.
I mean, those are the most likely explanations.
II. to be, or not to be?
On August twenty-fourth, 2006, the International Astronomy Union held its 26th triennial General Assembly, 2,500 astronomers gathered to discuss the criteria of a planet. It was thought, by the public and by the planetary scientists, that this would result in Eris’s promotion to planethood, a tenth and Pluto-sized addition to our solar system. Instead, the IAU released a statement demoting Pluto to dwarf planet. My very educated mother now served us nachos instead of nine potatoes [reference—mnemonic devices.]
Verb
pluto (present participle plutoing, simple past and past participle plutoed)
(neologism) To demote or devalue something.
For forty-five days, I existed in a world where Pluto was a planet. For forty-five days, I was categorized as infant instead of fetus, and Pluto was categorized as planet instead of dwarf planet. I, promoted, and then, before I could even smile, it was demoted. The two of us shuffled along into our separate human categories while Pluto lovers across the world looked up at the sky and mourned.
III. dreamland
That bed on that Sunday morning when I was thirteen was inside a big Victorian house on the corner of a long, traffic-loud main road, forty minutes outside of Boston, in a little town that nobody recognizes the name of. The streets were lined with houses that, outside of the town center, generally looked copy-and-paste perfect, lawns that husbands spent weekend hours manicuring. The driveways held shiny SUVs big enough to shuttle the American Dream two point five children to soccer and Girl Scouts and t-ball, and the downtown area contained four-ish overpriced boutiques and exactly two mediocre pizza places. Enter: the suburbs.
This is where I filled out ten of my journals, recorded the main portion of my childhood. This is where my sister and I disappeared into fictional characters every afternoon after lunch, tumbled through towering arborvitae bushes as warriors and wizards, monster hunters and pickpockets. This is where we spent summers, soles of our feet blackened and skin brown with sun, eating spoonfuls of ice with maple syrup and lemon juice, chasing chickens through the grass, and spraying each other with draught-rationed hose water. Where all six of us crunched out into the yard one night, waterproof jackets and snow up to our knees, to look up through spidery branches at the stars.
I’ve never seen skies like I saw in Massachusetts, skies that made me feel like I really was made of stardust, tiny and massive all at once, chest aching with the hugeness of it all. Like I was the tiniest piece of the galaxy, orbiting 3.3 billion miles out.
This is what I want to remember of the suburbs.
IV. list one: reasons why I’m probably an alien
There’s a birthmark on my arm that looks like a constellation.
I think I would like it better if we were nocturnal.
I often forget how normal human communication works.
When I look at inanimate objects, sometimes they have personalities.
I don’t think I really know how to make friends.
My body doesn’t always feel like it belongs to me.
For a long time, I would give anything to live in a different world.
I don’t know if I know what love is.
Sometimes I get this feeling behind my ribs like dread, like longing, like I’m on some sort of tipping point, waiting and wishing and like if I don’t see stars or yell over ocean waves or lay on my back in the rain, I might collapse inward, and that doesn’t sound very human to me.
V. 3.3 billion miles out
This article is about the dwarf planet. For the deity, see Pluto (mythology). For other uses, see Pluto (disambiguation) — Wikipedia
Pluto is the smallest, farthest, strangest planet. Perhaps strangest is the wrong word here—it would not float in a massive cosmic bathtub (read, Saturn), and does not have fifty-seven named moons (read, Jupiter), and is not the color of a radioactive Mediterranean sea (read, Uranus). What it does have is a mildly eccentric orbit, and a mass twenty-nine times smaller than the next smallest planet (read, Mercury). It’s the only planet to inhabit the Kuiper Belt, and wasn’t named until 1930, eighty-four years after the last planet was named (read, Neptune). Said name was suggested by an eleven-year-old girl, who was compensated for her work with the equivalent of 394 dollars.
So maybe if not strange, Pluto is an outlier. 3.3 billion miles away from Earth, it rotates on its side and orbits the Sun every 247.94 Earth years, cold and hazy and crowned by a heart-shaped glacier the size of Texas and Oklahoma combined. For seventy-six years, it was small and dark and an outsider, but at least it had the title of planet. At least it was part of something big, something important. It was included. An infinity full of celestial bodies, and it was chosen as part of this specialized group: the big shots, the Olympians of outer space. It qualified as a favorite—what’s your favorite planet? Mine? Oh, it’s Pluto.
And then, humans took a closer look at their categorization, and decided that it fit into another slot better.
No one has a favorite dwarf planet.
VI. dreamland, revisited
Nobody is real in the suburbs. Everyone has this mask on, this polite smile and automated greeting: heyhowareyou? goodthankshow’reyou? Everybody likes everybody, except.
In the suburbs, passive aggression is abundant. Maybe in the city, people tell you when your friendship is coming to a close, but in dreamland, you learn in snapshots:
A social media post, your solar system minus one (read, you). Shoulders knocking ahead, closing the gap everyone told you you fit into. Feet slowly shifted from sidewalk to
the grass, which is very green in the suburbs. This is a result of hardware stores that smell like rubber and wood chips and stock big plastic bags of chemicals, stores that I am trying to think about instead of
how my sneakers are in the extremely green blades and everyone else’s are on the sidewalk even though I invited them here, on this walk, and how when I was eleven,
I decided that I was too strange. And I stood in front of the mirror on the back of my door and put my hair into a high ponytail and dressed in sweatpants to practice telling stories the way everyone else did, dramatically, sans adjectives, and in the present tense;
so, like, I think I’m going to lunch with them, but they, like, totally forget to invite me! And I have lunch with my siblings instead which is like, okay—
and if I were normal, I would stop not thinking about grass seed and say something funny and they would invite me back onto the sidewalk, except that I seem to have forgotten how humans speak to each other because,
as previously mentioned, I am most likely an alien.
So maybe if not strange, then an outlier.
VII. list two: questions for the eons
Who decided that grass should be green?
What can you buy with the equivalent of 394 dollars?
Why didn’t the IAU consult us before plutoing Pluto?
Does everyone collect proof that they’re likable?
Why do people love to put things in boxes?
If When we find aliens, who will they take with them?
Am I other, or just awkward?
How many people were angry on August twenty-fourth, 2006?
Is there a word for the way that I love?
VIII. pluto (mythology)
Imagine being a creature so powerful, fate would bend to your will. Made of earth and skies, with power threaded into each vertebra and pulsing, golden, through your veins, you should have been given the chance to be a great ruler. Born a little later or a little more right, maybe you would’ve. Maybe you—Hades—would’ve been the one to finish off your father and rescue your cannibalized siblings from his stomach. Maybe you would’ve been the one to be gifted the sky, and become the not-so-just ruler of everything, leader of the Olympians and king of the cosmos.
Instead, you—Hades—born with the same golden blood and sparkling power, were given the Underworld for a domain and cast off into the shadows to watch over not-quite-humans. King of ghosts, with a name that meant the unseen, absent from or lurking in the background of every myth except the ones where you—he—is a raging tyrant. One of the Olympians, but without a throne on Mount Olympus. Powerful enough to be part of the big trio, but still ignored most of the time in favor of Poseidon and Zeus.
It can’t be a coincidence that the smallest planet shares the Roman name for Hades. Pluto the dark and cold, Pluto the distant, Pluto the forgotten. Denied real planet status and denied real Olympian status, the favorites only of people who are quiet or considerate or a little odd (read, me)—Pluto the outcast.
IX. what if?
And it used to be when I closed my eyes before I fell asleep, what I pictured was someone reaching over to make sure I was still there. Someone’s fingers lacing through mine, thumb tracing over wrist bone, just to know that I was safe. Whole. What I pictured was someone who cared enough to remember to invite me, and someone who wrote long-winded letters full of metaphors and signed with love.
In that darkness behind my eyelids, we sat in sun-warmed silence and knotted dandelion stems into crowns, and then, fingers sticky with milky sap and dusted with pollen, laid on our backs until the sky darkened and the stars appeared. We traced the constellations and replaced forgotten names—Andromeda, Cancer, Aquila—with our own. I pointed at a little dark spot between stars and imagined that Pluto was somewhere beyond it, and I thought that I could finally stop trying to figure out what I was. Maybe I wasn’t plutoid or planet or alien and maybe I could stop filling my drawers with torn-out journal entries trying to put a name to the way I felt when that person put their head on my shoulder and maybe I didn’t actually have to know what to call myself when someone asked who I liked.
And then I opened my eyes and the Plutoless space was just glow-in-the-dark stick-on stars and my ceiling was just my ceiling and my drawer was still full of crumpled paper.
X. quotes from enraged third graders
Dear natural history museum,
You are missing planet Pluto. Please make a model of it. This is what it looks like. It is a planet.
//
I think Pluto is a real planet and I took a poll of 11 people. The question was. Do you think Pluto is a planet?
//
Some people like Pluto. If it doesn’t exist then they don’t have a favorite planet. Please write back, but not in cursive because I can’t read cursive.
//
Pluto is my favorite planet!!! You are going to have to take all of the books away and change them. Pluto Is a planet!!!!!!!
XI. boxes
At the word taxonomy, most people probably think of King Phillip, who came over for good spaghetti [reference—mnemonic devices]. They probably think of Canis lupus and middle school charts copied from Wikipedia pages—animalia chordata mammalia primates hominidae homo sapiens. A classification system first touched on by Aristotle, further developed by Medieval philosophers (highly inaccurate) and the Italian physician Andrea Cesalpino (slightly more accurate), and eventually revolutionized by Carl Linnaeus in the eighteenth century (still currently accurate).
There’s a broader definition for taxonomy, though, one that doesn’t involve whether or not an animal produces milk:
Noun
taxonomy /takˈsänəmē/
2. A system of classification.
And in this sense, taxonomy has existed since humans have. A need to organize the world around us, as intrinsic as dance and grammar and rib cages. A need to take the chaos that is biology, or academia, or conceptual ideas (seventeenth-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, tried to create an alphabet of human thought—a universal language capable of expressing scientific, metaphysical, and mathematical concepts) and put them into neat little boxes. To sort celestial bodies into dwarf planets and people into single words.
I made a list one time, of all the things I could be classified as: daughter, friend, sister, writer, dancer, dreamer, oldest child, human. This was so I didn’t have to think of myself with rampant thoughts, so I didn’t have to consider why my body felt wrong sometimes or why I tended to forget what was dream and what was reality. One word is easier to define than a book of them, and it’s certainly easier to wrap your head around than a whole being is (this is why taxonomy succeeded as a study) (probably).
The only problem with boxes is that, usually, you end up with a pile of miscellaneous bits (read, items. Or organisms. Or people). What was Pluto after it was a planet and before it was a dwarf? Where do I fit if there’s no word to describe how I love, if there’s no box to label people who don’t wear high ponytails and whose feet find grass more often than sidewalk?
note: additional list of questions may be needed.
XII. existential crisis from a non-pastel journal
Why is it that I can never think of anything to say? Why am I so awkward all of the time? I hate being the silent one. I think that I make people uncomfortable because I’m uncomfortable, and then I come across as both boring and odd, and I didn’t know you could be both at once, but there you are. I’m like a dusty taxidermied zebra in a museum you didn’t want to go to. I’m like a collection of nutcrackers in your grandmother’s house. I think I’m a fake person. Probably some UFO dropped me here years ago and I forgot about it, and now I’m an imposter among humans and someday the aliens will come take me back and that will be better for everyone because then they won’t have to deal with the weird half-person hovering at the edges of their groups all of the time, and they can stop pretending to like me and maybe I’d stop trying to read people’s minds all of the time because I’d be an alien with mind reading powers and I could just look into their brains instead. And it would be better for me too, because these aliens wouldn’t ask me to describe myself in three words and they wouldn’t ask me to tell them what kind of person I like in just one word, and I wouldn’t have to spend the gray minutes before I fall asleep trying not to think the word queer or
XIII. wish:
That I had a universal language capable of expressing all of my human thoughts.
XIV. a conversation with Pluto, c. 2002
Interviewer: So glad to have you here. We all seem to have some burning questions about your status these days.
Pluto: So it seems.
Interviewer: And what have you been keeping busy with lately?
Pluto: Oh, the usual. Just trying to be an active member of the community. Appeared for some pictures the other day. Got to keep up that good image. You know, uh. Among planets.
Interviewer: Right, you posed for Hubble recently. NASA’s putting together the best compound photos of you we’ve ever had.
Pluto: Well, I thought I’d give people something to talk about, heh. Wouldn’t want them to…
Interviewer: Continue?
Pluto: Yeah, uh, forget about me. Or whatever.
Interviewer: Right, let’s address the elephant in the room. What do you think about the controversy around your title?
Pluto: Everyone seems to think it’s important.
Interviewer: And you?
Pluto: I don’t know. I’ve…well, to be honest, I’ve spent a lot of time feeling like an imposter. You know the drill—9-5 job, big fancy car, go eat dinner at 6:30 with Charon and the family. Try to keep the lawn as green as everyone else’s. Maybe it would be nice to—
Interviewer: But you’re enraged, aren’t you? You should be absolutely furious. How dare they try to demote you after just seventy-three years?
Pluto: Oh, well—
Interviewer: And that deal with the natural history museum a couple of years ago? Absolutely uncalled for. I hope you’re getting fired up about this, because people are prepared to fight on your behalf. They really are.
Pluto: Okay, but listen. I’ve heard a rumor that Eris might be reclassified as a plutoid. So maybe it’s less like being demoted and more like—
Interviewer: Right, that’s all the time we have for today! Thanks for tuning in, folks, and make sure to keep up with Chanel Nine News and the heated Plutonian debate. Now to Jerry, with the meteor report.
XV. august 24, 2006
Scientifically, it made perfect sense to demote Pluto. When the IAU gathered at that assembly, they decided that there were three criteria for a planet to be a planet:
a) is in an orbit around the Sun
b) has sufficient mass to remain nearly round under the gravitational pull of the rest of space
c) “has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit”
Pluto, as it turns out, isn’t big enough to kick out its neighbors. Its gravitational field isn’t strong enough to push away the comets, other almost-planets, and bits of ice and rock that surround it (this is, as it turns out, why it’s the only planet in the Kuiper Belt). Its biggest moon is almost half its size, almost big enough to be its own entity, and there are three other dwarf planets (Eris included) in the general vicinity that it couldn’t be bothered to push away. Logically, if Pluto had remained a planet, these three would’ve had to have been upgraded too, and there has to be a limit to the number of Olympians in the sky.
But for seventy-six years, people found themselves in the smallest planet. Pluto collected the people who felt like outsiders—the lonely and the odd, the quiet and the aliens. It attracted the miscellaneous, the boxless, forming our own box in the little, heart-marred loner of the solar system. And in 2006, when the statement was released and our planet was officially plutoed, a lot of people understood the reasoning and rioted anyway. There were thousands of letters of complaint sent to the IAU, to the planetary scientists, to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who was responsible for the omission of Pluto from the American Natural History Museum’s model of the solar system. Maybe there was conclusive evidence as to why it was a Kuiper Belt object, but we weren’t ready to let it go yet, not when we’d finally found ourselves in something.
XVI. because I can still imagine
We’re back in the mini maze of those arborvitaes, and instead of enchanted woods or crime-ridden city streets, the backyard has morphed into outer space. We’re astronauts, outfitted in sleek silver suits, eyes bright behind spherical helmets, fingers drumming on the inside of our spaceship as we hurtle toward the next big step for mankind. On the side of our rocket: S.S. Pluto (S.S. for spaceship, of course).
Outside the little port window, stars blur by like snow on the highway, machines beeping as we engage light-speed. It’s been a long journey from Earth’s orbit to here, but with the help of a genius skeleton crew and state-of-the-art space equipment, we’re almost to our destination.
When the wall of screens in front of me tells us we’re close, I pull back on a lever and slow the ship. Pluto materializes ahead, terra-cotta red and sandy, pale cream heart rotated to face us as we arc in for a landing, and I can feel the kick of my heart against my ribs. This is it. This is home.
We, of course, are the first Plutonian colonizers, come to plant our flag on the icy heart and scope out a location for our new settlement. We’ve already plotted out the rules of this new country in neat, numbered lists, and the foremost is that it’s an outcast’s planet. Maybe we’ve left Mars for the scientists and Kepler for the environmentalists, but this one is for us—the almost-aliens and the heart-heavy outsiders. The kids who ache for sidewalk space. The girls who lay alone in bed, searching plastic stars for a sign of life.
Ahead, the planet blurs into rusty terrain and then we’re landing in the dip of a valley, dust billowing up around us. With an intake of breath, I engage oxygen input to my helmet, stand for a moment in the hissing cube of the airlock, and then step out onto my planet.
Maybe-alien, mostly miscellaneous, but here I am, finally. Plutonian.
Merrik Moriarty is a junior creative writer at Charleston County School of the Arts in Charleston, SC. Her work is upcoming in the South Carolina Honors College’s Writing South Carolina, and has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. When not working on surrealist fiction pieces or lyric essays, she can probably be found searching for cats or taping little paper things into her journal.