Once there were three sisters. Their names were Tara, Ani, and Kali. Tara was the eldest and she had freckles all over her face and arms. Ani was the middle sister and she had a light scar that ran down her left cheek, which she had received from falling out of a tree when she was seven years old. Kali was the youngest and her eyes were different colors, one blue, one green. They lived with their mother in a little cottage in a valley. To the north there were mountains, to the west was an ocean, to the east there were fields of wheat and barley and amaranth, and to the south there was a dense forest.
One day, the mother threw open the cottage door. “I’m releasing you into the world!” She dramatically drew her arms to her chest and then flung them out as if flinging her very heart. There was only silence from her daughters, so she turned to see all three looking confused. Kali, her wild and sensitive child, looked angry.
“You’re kicking us out?”
“What? No, I’m releasing you into the world!” The mother once again dramatically flung her metaphorical heart from her chest.
Ani, practical and straightforward, was grumpy. “It feels like you’re kicking us out.”
Their mother closed the door. “Let’s try this again.” She walked over the hearth, which was in the center of their home. “My darling daughters, it is time for you to make your own ways. It has been a delight keeping you close and now I am sending you out to learn what cannot be learned here with me.” The mother again went to the front door and flung it open with the now expected dramatic flair. “Be sure to visit often and tell me all about what you notice!”
The three sisters did not move. Tara, insightful and sarcastic, narrowed her eyes. “If we know we’re going to want to come back, can we just not leave? I’m asking for them, not me.”
“On the porch are three satchels, one for each of you. Go. And then you can come back.”
Tara was the first to move. She walked out the door and her sisters followed. Their mother blew a kiss, gave a cheerful wave, and closed the cottage door.
Ani picked up a satchel. “Well, which way?”
Tara put on her satchel. “Straight ahead is the forest.”
Kali threw her satchel over her shoulder and began walking south. “Let’s go and look around so we can say we did.”
And so the three sisters left the cottage and entered the woods.
It turns out that going to the woods because you have been sent out into the world to find yourself is different from going to the woods to play amongst the trees. Tara contemplated this difference as she walked with her sisters. The trees seemed closer together; the air felt heavier. In her satchel, she found a small notebook and pencil, so she wrote these noticings down.
“Are we done?” Ani asked, trying to read what Tara was writing.
Kali was several paces ahead. “There are people here.”
“Really?” Tara put her notebook and pencil back in the satchel.
The people Kali noticed turned out to be a family of woodcutters: a man with an ax and a rope chainsaw; a woman with a makeshift basket tied to her back; and two children, a boy and a girl, seemingly attached at the hip.
The sisters approached and, upon learning that the family were cutting and gathering wood to sell in town, asked to help.
So Tara went with the man to chop wood and Ani went with the woman to gather fallen branches.
“What do I do?” Kali shouted after Ani, irritated at the entire scenario in general and at being left behind in particular.
“Play with the children,” Ani suggested as she and the woman left the clearing.
The two children, a boy and a girl, looked at Kali expectantly.
Kali stared back at them. The children were young and thin and though they didn’t look frightened, they did look suspicious. She forced what she hoped was a non-threatening smile.
“What do you want to play?”
The little boy looked at his sister, then back at Kali. “Escape.”
“You want to play escape?”
“No. We have to escape.” The little boy said it quietly, as if afraid of being overheard. “Our father’s wife is not our mother. She keeps leaving us here in the woods because there is not enough food at home to feed us all.”
Kali felt something hot in her stomach. “What? That’s horrible! What kind of person does that?”
“A hungry person,” said the little girl.
“We only know how to get back to our cabin. We need to get someplace else.”
But Kali could no longer hear the children, only a loud rustling sound that filled her head. The heat in her stomach rose up her throat and pushed out of her mouth and she breathed fire.
The children screamed and ran away and still Kali breathed out more and more fire until it burned away the woods around her. She breathed and burned until she was out of breath and fire.
Ani was suddenly there, grabbing hold of Kali. As Ani opened her mouth to scream, a rush of water came out of her and drowned the flames around them. And then Tara was there, too, standing over the two sisters huddled on the ground in a puddle of wet ashes.
Tara bent over them. She opened her mouth to cry a question, but instead a flood of stars poured out of her and the burnt, wet forest dissolved away.
Shocked, the three sisters stood and looked around. Far off, stars twinkled. They could see each other, but other than that, everything was black.
Ani turned to Kali, horrified. “What have you done?”
“Me?” Kali glared at Ani. She turned to Tara. “What have you done?”
Tara started to respond in anger--she wanted to scream, “I saved us!”--but then she stopped herself. She noticed the anger and confusion on Ani’s face. She noticed the outrage and dismay on Kali’s. She noticed the heavy feeling in her own chest. Tara had never felt this way, sad and angry and alone all at once. She named it despair. She thought she should write that down in her notebook. It seemed important, this new feeling.
“What did we learn?” Tara asked her sisters, pulling out her notebook. “I learned how to chop wood.”
“I learned how to gather tinder,” Ani said.
“I learned…” Kali began, and she felt the fire in her belly again, hot, rising.
“Just breathe.” Tara touched Kali gently.
Kali didn’t like being told to just breathe. What did Tara know, with her new notebook? But still, Kali closed her eyes and imagined the fire dwindling. She opened her mouth carefully, just in case. “I learned that hunger is a very bad thing.”
Ani looked at her younger sister and felt tears fill her from somewhere deep inside. The sorrow rose up in her and leaked out of her eyes. “So you burned everything?”
Kali turned to her sister, her mismatched eyes flashing as if reflecting the flames inside of her. “So I burned everything,” she said, her voice hard. “It deserved to be burned.”
There was a shuddering sound. A door opened in the cosmos and the sisters’ mother put her head through. “Ah, here you are. Come along.”
The three sisters looked at each other, then back at the doorway in the middle of space with their mother’s head sticking through it.
Kali shrugged. “Whatever.” She passed through the door and her sisters followed her.
The three sisters stood apart from each other in front of the hearth, facing their mother.
“Ready to go out again?” their mother asked.
“Are you kidding? She burned the forest to the ground!” Ani pointed at Kali.
“And then what happened?” their mother asked.
“And then--uh, an ocean came out of my mouth,” Ani replied.
“And stars came out of mine,” Tara said.
“That’s interesting, isn’t it?” their mother said.
“It’s weird,” Kali snarled, feeling the fire in her belly, though now it felt under her control. “You wanted us to notice that the world is full of terrible things? Well, now I know. And I know I can do something about it.” Kali turned and walked out the door.
Tara went to the window. “She’s going east. Into the fields.”
“Do we follow her?” Ani asked her mother.
The mother shrugged. “I don’t know. Do you?”
Ani didn’t like this new feeling of sadness in her chest. “Well, I don't follow her. Do you?” she asked Tara.
Tara turned away from the window. “No. I am going north. To the mountains. I think I want to be alone.”
“Okay,” Ani said. “I guess that leaves west for me.”
“That’s settled then.” Their mother opened the front door.
The two sisters looked at each other, then at their mother, then walked through the door, which the mother closed behind them.
“I don’t understand this,” Ani said as they walked away from the cottage. “Why is she sending us away?”
“It does feel odd,” Tara agreed. “But something is happening. I can’t explain why, but I can feel that this is how this is supposed to go.”
“I hope you’re right.” Ani pointed to the east. “Because the fields are on fire.”
Tara whipped around to see the fields of wheat and barley and amaranth blazing, black smoke rising up. The two sisters began to run and as they neared the burning fields, Kali emerged from the flames, a sword in her right hand and a shield in her left. Her hair was singed and her face was black with soot.
Ani felt the sorrow in her rise like a wave. She opened her mouth and water poured forth, drenching the fields. When she was empty, she fell to her knees, gasping. “Open your mouth!” Ani said to Tara. “Take us away from here!”
“No, don’t!” Kali said. “I’m not going back.”
Tara froze. She could hear her heartbeat pounding. That despairing feeling rose up in her and she clapped her hands over her mouth, not wanting to unleash that feeling into the world.
“Open it!”
“Don’t!”
“Why?” Ani faced Kali. “Just--why?”
Kali raised her sword and shield. “Everything is bad. The fields were full of dead things. Animals, people, all dead, abandoned. The world is a bad place.”
Tara felt a sob rising in her. She tried to shove it down, but it broke through and as the stream of stars emerged from her open mouth, Kali breathed fire and the fire and stars collided. And then an ocean of tears came from Ani’s mouth and the three sisters were surrounded by a fire of stars and tears.
And then, silence. The sisters lay on the damp, burnt ground. None of them moved.
“I told you to keep your mouth shut.” Kali said.
“I tried.” Tara groaned. Every part of her body hurt, but somehow she felt better.
“Where did you get a sword?” Ani asked.
“It was in my satchel.”
Tara contemplated this. “Ani, what is in your satchel?”
Ani forced herself into a sitting position, reached into her satchel, and pulled out a comb. Tara and Kali also sat up. They all stared at the comb. Then Ani stood and went to Tara. She ran the comb through Tara’s hair and as she combed, little stars fell, released from the tangles. Ani combed and combed until Tara’s hair shone and no more stars fell from the comb.
“Let me,” Tara took the comb and as she combed Ani’s hair, tears were released with the tangles. When she was done, Tara returned the comb to Ani. Ani turned to Kali.
“Don’t!” Kali slid away on the ground. “You know what comes out of my hair.”
“Fire.” Tara said gently to Kali. “Let Ani comb the flames.”
Kali slid back towards her sisters and as Ani combed Kali’s hair, little sparks were released with the tangles.
“It feels...better…” Kali looked at the ground, where the stars and flames and tears created shiny puddles of light.
“It’s beautiful,” Tara noticed and she pulled out her notebook.
A year later, the sisters sat on the porch of their cottage. To the west was a pool of light that shimmered in the setting sunlight. To the east was a garden. To the south was a little patch of trees. To the north there were mountains. There was a shuddering sound. A door opened in the garden and the sisters’ mother stepped through.
The three sisters embraced their mother. They showed her the cottage they had built, the garden they had planted, the pool of light they had created. They ate dinner together and then sat on the cottage porch together.
“What did you notice?” the mother asked.
“Patterns,” Ani said.
“And you found your place,” the mother said.
“But we didn’t really go anywhere. Not really.” Kali frowned.
The mother pulled her daughters close to her. “Finding your place isn’t about going somewhere, it’s about expanding the capacity of where you are at.”
Tara contemplated. “It isn’t real, is it? Out there isn’t real.”
“It’s real,” the mother answered. “It’s all real. The question is, what is real? And how do we respond to it? Did you ever go west? Might be time.”
The four women looked west, where they could just see the last shimmers of sunlight on the far-off ocean waters.
“Well, good news is you can’t set that on fire,” Ani said to Kali.
“Watch me.”
Katie Carey is a spiritual midwife, community herbalist, and theater artist devoted to real-izing the Emerging Story. Katie spent 10 years doing theater in the Northwest, followed by 8 years of theater in Chicago. She then decided what she really wanted to do was raise a family in a hand-built hobbit hole in the middle of a mud puddle on a Montana farm. So that’s what’s happening now. Katie's works include How to Re-Ignite Your Internal Fire, Foul-Mouthed Mystic, Vasilisa + Baba Yaga (or: How to Destroy Your Enemies without Losing Your Soul), Excommunicated! The Musical, New Creation Stories for the Emerging Paradigm, The Real Life Adventures of Lizzy and Rilla, and Solitaire.
Katie has degrees in theater and spirituality, so she can act like she cares.
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