At dusk on his backyard square, Coyote drapes his father’s corpse across crawling earthworms in a shallow pit. Lighter fluid sprayed on, a lit match descends before smoke ascends into Ms. Sky’s black autumn lungs. Coyote hollers to his daughter to come witness a family of blue-rooted flames smothering the flesh of his father, her grandfather who first taught them both to breathe as a trickster within sunbeams and moonbeams and beams of sun-moon conception.
Two generations stand side by side as a fire consumes their paternal link. When Coyote turns to face his daughter, he steadies an indigo urn below her eyes to collect every descending tear.
Under a lunar harvest glow, the flames whimper like a kill shelter dog right before slaughter. Coyote scoops the ashes into the urn’s sheathed encasement. As commanded by his father, he sets the urn open on a shelf above the fireplace in his oak home. His daughter enters her bedroom while he stumbles upstairs to collapse onto his bed where he dreams of slipping his golden-finned self through a hole in a net. Coyote’s scaled freedom only navigates through neurological waters until he jolts up to Ms. Sky’s thunderclap mouth sending in a flood.
Once he shrinks to the scale of a goldfish, she follows his transformed body swimming down splintered stairs and escaping into the urn. “My father’s ghost and my daughter’s grief will keep me safe,” he declares as he submerges inside yet Ms. Sky squeezes an onyx cloud’s irate water through the opening. The urn cracks on the shelf.
Past glass shards, ashes, tears, and a finger bone which survived the fire, he swims into a fishbowl. The goldfish pair declare, “Hello friend. What’s your name?” “My name is Coyote. Now Ms. Sky won’t know who to hunt,” he chuckles in glee. He slashes and dashes in satisfied trickery. Up above, she yells in a confused rage. Yet outside his transparent haven, water claws his daughter’s warped bedroom door. “Ms. Sky, you must not hurt my daughter!” “I’ll only hold discourse with you if you return to your original form.”
Back to his full frame, he grabs the finger bone and breaststrokes up into his bedroom. Upright on his bed, Coyote vaults the bone above his head and cries out, “Ms. Sky, Ms. Sky, why are you punishing me?” “Because you punished my lungs with your smoke.” “Will you now give me the gift of a dry day?” “Slice yourself wide. I’ll flood your organs and leave your corpse alone.” “My father’s tear-soaked bone will protect me.” “Ha — your demand for a cerulean sky is as hollow as that bone.” “What if I sacrifice my own blood?”
Across the doorway, Ms. Sky grins when she pulls a lightning bolt from her pocket. Over his sleeping daughter, one kinship brain is a wet forest of growth. An indigo glass shard shakes in Coyote’s paw. She wakes up. “Papa, what are you doing?” “Daughter, Ms. Sky will now usher me into decomposition. Burn my body in the backyard pit. Secure my ashes in a closed urn above the fireplace.”