The sun spins its slow circle of beam upon her left hand. She smiles, an echo of the waning crescent moon. her hair brushes the stream. she lays her palm flat upon the water as it moves a wave up to reach her, a furl, the curve of a note. the air is warm with dirt. in cloud-speak a message appears above her and she pauses to read. the air becomes still, quiet as the inside of a seashell. she crawls inside the conch. with the sand of her feet she leaves footprints across the porcelain surface. the cloud meets her within the echo of shell. the curved ridge leading to the outside is like the soft relaxed eyelid of summer, a misted gaze. she crouches inside the shell and hugs her knees as the cloud pulses secrets. her ears turn white with the smoothness of shell. she blinks and her eyelids rattle. she pauses to shake the sand from her eyes, her hair spilling rivulets of dark river down her face, neck, back. her eyes fill a hint of marine. she reaches for a ray of sun and wraps it around her waist. she stands, the bark of her legs growing tall until she lifts up out of the shell, branch arms raised skyward. she grows until she fills the riverbank, she grows until she sees the village, and the grazing cattle with the quizzical calves. she swallows great gulps of sorrows and diffuses them inside of the creation within her, illuminating the shadows with her incredible lightness, the shimmering beauty of her reckless and wild passion for love of even the smallest leaf, the littlest rock, the children in the schoolyard with buckets and laughter, books tossed aside. she sees in them the reflection of the sun she still wears around her waist. as she contemplates and grows, past the peaks of groves and hillscapes, the sunbeam begins to move, crawling up her spine and moving in the tiny nerves radiating up and down the map of her back and around her sides. she begins to fold inward, as the magnificence of her unfolding perpetuates around her, she is within her body, holding the hand of the wave in the river, which begins to move suddenly, out of her hand, and back into the flow of the stream. she opens her eyes, begins to walk backward, tracing her footsteps.