I told you not to trust her, whispered Jeremiah. She is not one of us, and she never was. Send her away now.

Maybe he was right. Maybe Murphy would never give in to the Spirit. But I couldn’t just throw her out, could I?

She was my sister.

I lay on my bed that night, listening to Jeremiah’s tapes. Grandma had them all in her bedroom in a safe, shut tight. I guess she was the one hiding them in the Split Tree all along. She gave me a certain tape, marked special for me.

“You’ll enjoy this one,” was all she said.

I closed the window and shut off the lights and pressed play.

“Every human being is a collision.” Jeremiah spoke in a whisper, private and personal, as if this were a sermon for only me to hear. “Two worlds smashing into one, forming something new. No doubt, children, that this is an act of violence. There is no creation without violence, no sacrifice without the shedding of blood. Is violence desirable? No, but sometimes it is necessary in this fallen world. The things that form us are no less violent than the cataclysm that created this world. Did you know the earth itself was formed from a collision, two planets slamming into each other, fused into one? Our beautiful world and all the abundant life it contains—our very selves, all we know and love—are the result of the most awful violence. Because in the right hands, and for the right purpose, violence and creation are the very same thing.”

The darkness of the room began to churn and swirl like smoke rising up from a fire. I wasn’t sure if I was listening to a tape anymore or if Jeremiah was there in the room with me, walking in the shadows, so real I could reach out and touch him.

“If we are to escape our isolation, our loneliness,” he said, “then we must be created anew. Our only hope in this light-starved world is to burn so brightly that all of humanity will turn to notice. We must transcend, collide like an errant planet with the Spirit of the world, to burn and fuse into something new, into pure light. We must cast aside that to which we formerly clung, sacrifice what is most dear, pitch it into the fire so that we may all rise together like smoke, an offering to the Spirit, a sacrifice pleasing to it. We must undergo the violence that leads to creation, the shedding of blood that can make us beautiful, as we were meant to be. Only then may we transcend. Only then can the world ever become what it was intended to be, a splendor of light.