The Lit Sky and Lifesavers

There were 60 of us standing on the slant of a hill, cracking the Lifesavers in our mouths at nighttime, the stars rolled out above us. The wind pressed sharp against our faces and swished inside our coats, our fingers and ears numbing in gloves and hats and our eyes watering.

"Now, you can't suck on them. You have to bite on them for them to light up," Sarah instructed us as we tore open the candies and put them between our teeth, the mint and frost of wintergreen filling our mouths. Our cheeks were cold inside and out.

The mints glowed on our tongues, green sparks flying between crunches.

"I asked Matt," Sarah said of her husband, a high school biology teacher,"why they do this. He said that scientists don't know. Something to do with the ions splitting."

There were eight of us left. The 52 had wrapped their coats a little closer and huddled together, shuffling back in groups to the three heated cabins. We eight turned to the hill behind us, a lit cross at the top, forty feet high.

The hill was steep, ice embedded in the dirt and grass. It slanted up and came into plains of gravel. A trail wound up to the cross, but we took the incline, burying boot heels in the dirt as we took the climb a few of us by few.

I laid down halfway, deep cold breaths from my belly puffing into the air, dragon smoke. The stars were brighter up here, further from the ground lights. I looked for the Dipper and her son but couldn't find them in the sky pregnant with light and planets. The moon Cheshire Cat half-smiled in the middle of the sky, and I started talking to God. I always find him in the spaces between dark and hillsides.

There is a poem in Genesis 1 in the midst of God pulling all the earth together, out of his hands--green, fragrant, and abundant. It is older than the stories, passed down by mouth from the daughter of the first mother, cradled in her arms:

   "So God created man in his own image,
    in the image of God he created him;
    male and female he created them."

Below my body and the sky, in the city, the buildings peak with imitation stars. They are gold and rust and flickering, built by the images of God, trying to catch the heavens in glass and wires, trying to speak light like the Light-Speaker.