and the mature are not.
*4 Here we find another hint that would be obvious to any Widow reader: by denying Sarya the title of Mother, the spokeswidow is insulting her even in death. Note that the storyteller did not make the same mistake earlier in the story.
The little girl is naked.
She is standing, up to her knees, in a pool of water. Her mother is there, up to mid-calf, and she is dragging something small and blue through the water. Those are the little girl’s clothes, and they have mud on them because she was chasing the animals again. There are others around her mother: her mother’s friends. One makes a joke, and the little girl knows it’s a joke because everyone laughs, so she laughs too—loudly—even though she doesn’t understand it.
And then the joke is over and she is back to wading and looking for interesting rocks. She has found one rock today, but there’s always the chance of a better one. She looks out into the river with longing eyes. She is not allowed to go out there, only to stand in this pool where the water is not so fast. She has always been fascinated with the water, with how it sparkles and hisses and splashes and how it shoots through her village and cleans their clothes. She wonders, often, how it leaves the village dirty but comes back again clean on the other side…
They are on the clean side now. She follows the water with her eyes, watches how it leaves here and travels through the village, and how on the far side it begins to bend upward. It curves uphill, into the forest, until it is flowing straight up. It doesn’t stop there, though. No, it continues upside down, stuck to the green ceiling of the world, until it runs above her on the other side of the sun. She can’t see it right now because the sun is there, and tonight when it turns into the moon it will be too dark to see more than a few gleams on the water on the other side of the world. But she knows it continues on the other side because she is standing in it. It makes a perfect and endless circle. Here, up to there, back down to here, back up to there…And if she were up there, she could look up and see her own village on the ceiling, and that is how things should be because that is how the world works—
And then she is underwater.
She is pulled to the surface, gasping. She clings to the brown arm that has seized her; she is shivering, her eyes wide. Her mother’s friends are laughing because she looked up too far and she fell down, and she is angry because they are laughing and now she is crying because she is angry and she hates that, she hates when her body does the wrong thing even once, let alone twice in a row: first falling over, and then crying when she doesn’t want to cry.
Stop it, she shouts at them, and they quiet. They give each other looks that she hates too, but she doesn’t know how to tell them to stop doing that so she buries her face in her mother’s clothes, and it’s not because she’s crying but if her tears get wiped off her face with the river water then that’s what happens.
You must keep your eyes on your side of the world, says her mother.
She makes a sound instead of replying, an angry sound.
I love you, says her mother.
She makes an angry sound again, but this time it’s in the grudging rhythm of the words. I. Love. You. And then she sighs into her mother’s damp clothing. It’s becoming more work to stay angry than to calm down, the way it always is when her mother holds her.
Behold, says her mother into her ear. The universe.
The little girl sits back in her mother’s arms to look at the rock she found under the water. It glistens as it shatters the sunlight into a thousand colors. Its round shape fits her hand perfectly, and she finds she has an almost uncontrollable desire to throw it. But no, it is her only rock. It is too precious to throw.
You imagine, says her mother, in your excruciatingly vague way, a galaxy that works differently than mine. You handwave the hard parts—making millions of species play nice for half a billion years,