1.

When the world was new, the moon was small.

You could swallow it each night and it was soft.

When the earth got older and harder, the moon became a chalky pill. A quick shake, a thrust of the head to toss it back. Day would come with a gag, light with a slight choke.

Don't worry. When the moon grows too large you can bite it, take it in pieces.

The last edges, sharp, will stay in the sky. Leave them; the points of the sickle can puncture organs. The ends can rip and tear.


2.

Why do people wish on stars? you want to know, and I don't know what to tell you.

Stars are little barbs, twisted into the skin of the sky.

I suppose, I say—but then I stop. It is too early to tell you that hope can do this to a person. It can dig in like the burrs that grabbed at your socks in the woods, when we took you hiking, the little snags that stuck your ankles and made you cry. Hope can get all the way inside you like that, burrow into the body, stay.


3.

Your father takes you to see the sun come up. One morning the two of you go, in his little fishing boat, down to the water.

You believe the sun lives in the lake house on the far side because this is where you see it appear. Your father likes this story and helps you tell it to yourself.

He once liked to fish, and he still says that he does, but I know that he goes without bait anymore, that he wakes early and takes no tackle, just drops his line into the lake and watches the fish and the sun and the water and catches nothing, harms nothing, leaves even the hook off his line just in case a dumb fish might bite it and bleed.

When the two of you return, I ask if you caught anything, and he says, as always, Not today.

He tells the story of the sun and I tell him that he'll have to take you to see it set on the other side. He'll need a story to give you for that.

Maybe another time, he says. There's not time, I say. There is, he says. There isn't, I say. Please, he says.

He is asking me to make what is brutal gentle. He is trying to do this himself. So we do a kind of violence to violence, we say every other word but death, we choose stories that sound like they come from outside of time.

.