THE SECRET KEEPING
(The genesis excerpt)

She was at the beginning once more, the genesis, and once more trapped in the void, hopelessly lost now between an elusive heaven and an immovable earth. The depth of who she had been--Lydia Beaumont--was gone forever, she realized, staring up at the sky. She admitted that something dark and formless had taken her place, as dark and formless as a body of water, and on that water she could see the spirit of a goddess moving, her wake disturbing the surface, rippling it, like goose bumps on skin. She could see the light, a reflection.

Shouldn’t she just say it was good? Shouldn’t she divide herself from this darkness? Call it a day? Call it a night? Yes, but then what of the morning? What of evening? She groaned low. Her heart was a firmament. She wanted to throw it across the water like a skipping stone, a shooting star, let her flame divide the water, gather it all in one place, that she might have dry land. Safe land, fertile and yielding.

Wouldn’t that be good? And then the only darkness would be the sky above her at night, full of stars for wishing and for the signs of the zodiac, or to happily mark the seasons, the days, the years. Darkness then would be good, too, simply a place for the sun to sleep at night or for the creatures of the earth to rest in until morning. Creatures like her. And a goddess. A goddess must have sleep, too.