A woman’s hands make fine threads dance. With needles of carabao horn, of bamboo, she embroiders names into silk—serpent ulap scale luna fire lihim gem azul eye liwanag river mariposa light talà—when she weaves these words into the fabric of sky, a charm against forgetting. With ink and thread she draws her own hands pero siempre estas manos desaparecen; she weaves enkanto contra palabras vaporosas, poemas contra vacía alma. And when her face begins to resemble the porcelain virgin’s face, for this firelight causes much to appear, still she sings: o diwata, your words are our breath! O diwata, our words are our offering to you!

2.

Some say thunder, child of the earth, calls to lightning, child of the sky, because they are twins, split in two by their spirit father. As the mortal woman ascended with her lover, the path through clouds to sun burned. Her flesh also burned. The child below the villagers wished to keep, so that the spirit father would always return to them.

Yes, he cleaved his son in two. And from these halves, the one skybound grew a new self just as the butiki who’s lost his tail. The one below would have perished had not the spirit father descended and breathed his breath into the lifeless half body. This one, how his voice booms when his twin brother streaks across heaven.

And their sister, the strange diwata whose light remains contained. Witness she is, and weaver. If she would only speak, then she would tell you—these stories I give you, I swear they are the truth.

3.

Before this time, sky was high as a tent. Children poked clouds with bamboo sticks. Some could jump high enough to touch it with their fingertips. When headhunters danced around the bonfire, keeping vigil, their blades pierced the skins of the gods.

…Yes, hija, we were headhunters once, our people…

There, the battlefield between forest and river’s edge, littered with headless bodies. The heads they took to their own village for they believed the soul resided there. Beyond the distant lowlands, a deity whose winged head our god buried with the remains of the serpent who ruled the clouds. The orphan spirit, whose body our god set afire. This is how he invited his enemy’s soul to be his spirit guardian.

Some also say, this was how the first coconut tree came to grow.

4.

Once a diwata stole fire. He brought it to the riverbanks where the earthdiver shivered, unclothed. This was her fate for peering through the hole in the clouds while her father hunted the red deer and the wild boar. She had grown tired of animal bones scattered, a house of musk and taut skins. How she’d wince as her father’s sharpened teeth pierced his prey’s liver.