The Stars and the Cookie Jar

sovay has seen this; I think she pronounced it acceptable.


Silk Road

Here. The way is at your feet. If you follow it until the golden grass
ends, they say you come to water salt as the earth. At the end of the
water, they say, you find where the sun sleeps; you could take your
horses at a gallop down into fire.

I have never followed the way to its ending. This is where we are,
with our tents braced bright against the wind and our horses dark
against the grass; no need to ride more than ten days toward the
sunrise, ten days back. This is where we have always been. This is
where we are.

In the old days, when we stretched the felts and hides over bones of
monsters, they called it the edge of the world.

I am old myself, skin and bones thin as the horn of a stirrup-cup. I
will never sit a horse again. I will never travel further toward the
sunrise, and yet I tell you this is not the edge. There is something.
There must be somewhere more.

The Snow Girl came, and what we call somewhere, she called there.

***
She came stumbling down from that pass, out of white sunlight and into
snow, on her own feet as if she had no use for a horse. Her clothes
were one glittering piece, all snow, so that if she had not been
moving we would all have taken her for an over-drifted tree; and there
within sight of our pickets and homes she lay down, and did not move
again.

My mother's sister shouted about a goddess; my older brother dropped a
hand down for his knife. I let fall the leading-rein I was knotting,
and for a moment leaned all my body against the warm rising flank of
my horse. Then I went forward, one step, two at a time, whispers and
crunches over the fresh wet snow. After the first white storm, but
before the grass has settled under the snow's weight, sometimes it all
gives way and cold closes over your head: it is as good a way to die
as any. Maybe I was so cautious because of that.

She was taller than me, the fallen one on the snow. The layers she
wore were fine and thin and frozen sparkling, as if she had danced
among the birch trees to find clothing. Her skin was blue and white.