One day say, sky. When light cleared cloud and dark light, fish rivered fruitland, and trees. Saddened time kept the chief birds within a sky and spring water past floating cedars. Swallowing the sky was left for the girl who was born. The yellow of the sky came together. Turned me back into the sky.
First a world was destroyed and created. Ocelots devoured me as the second sun rose. Later a world was an earthquake and no more. You were a flood, I a moon. Mostly moons were boys who played in the night. (Don’t leave them alone.) We should have met somewhere else before trying again. Something turned me inside out the fifth time. Say a volunteer stepped up and was devoured. Take this hummingbird feather with you when you go.
She lit a bark torch and set out. The highway was busy early in the morning, car headlights still on. Her eyes stained the clouds red. The world named after her. A tunnel entrance at the place where she worked caring for trees and shrubs. There were eclipses if her brother touched her while she slept.
Some days the girl and her brother fought over toys and she schemed revenge. She hid behind a door and sprung out on him with a marker pen in hand, scribbling black ink on his face. In fear of retaliation, she hid all day in the woods. When she woke up, she saw the moon through the branches and thought it was her brother looking for her and she screamed.
If it is dark the people walk into each other and fight. Birds and small mammals teach value of the night. My parents lived as spiders a time so that they might feed me. When the sun came to our world, they became people again and raised me to be proud of my world even when it despised us.
The sun prevents me from living forever. I watch it set and my eyes water. Hiking to the west does not help, because I can never move fast enough to catch the lost day. Terrible things guard the edges of the day and keep us from returning to yesterday. I do not have the strength to defeat these beasts and so each day my hair grows a little longer and my eyesight a little dimmer.
Each day had its sun, each sun had its sin. Ten mothers bathe their children and send them out into the yards with hair wet. They play ball together using the mulberry for home base. The sun tangles in the tree branches and dries their hair. If the ten suns shone at once, we would all die. But the children’s’ fathers work as astronomers and sometimes come home early from work. Each of them touches the mulberry tree and teaches his children how to respect the others.
This is why the people are not destroyed by fire.