III
Like most of her kind, she could not remember being born. Her first memory was of floating, suspended on the wind, surrounded by winking sparks. Their rising action guided, not by physics, but by something else – something that had dipped its fingers in the sunspots and swirled them as one might swirl milk in coffee, something that had watched molten magma cool and solidify, had seen the first rain fall on barren land, buffeted by waves tall as mountains. Were she anyone else, they would have called it foolish bravado, this attempt to resist what they all knew to be an irresistible force. But she was innocent, and so when she sang herself down again, they smiled and shook their heads and said, young people these days. She won’t last long down there, they said, all alone in an unforgiving world. She’ll come back eventually, it’s only a phase. She could not mark the precise moment when they forgot about her, but she felt it happen. It was some time after the first moment she set bare feet on stone.
The Trouble with Doorways 