Once there was a beautiful world full of all sorts of birds: cardinals and parrots and peacocks and birds you have never heard of in all colors. It was a world where sometimes baby birds got taken by snakes in the dead of night, and nice birds were caught by cats, and good birds got sick and fell from the sky, and sometimes mean vultures won in the end, and sometimes mom birds forgot to love their baby birds.

Meanwhile, though there were some very terrible birds and terrible things, there were also birds who made nests out of beautiful shells, and birds who fought badgers and rattlers and raccoons for their babies and friends at any cost, and birds who sang even when they were in cages. And anyway, just about all the birds—even the most unloved and underestimated birds—could fly. Every bird could tell you what worms smelled like and which constellations pointed where. Every bird could hear a grasshopper from two backyards away. Every bird contained multitudes.

The point is, the bird world was full of so many bad things. But it was full of beautiful things too.

And there was one particular bluebird, very small, who could not really chirp around birds she didn’t know, and who sometimes was clumsy enough to fly right into tree trunks, and her feathers were scraggly, and her mother bird never brought home worms for her, so she was a little starved inside. But this tiny bluebird decided she was going to gobble up all the darkness of the world, grab it with her little beak and devour it. Nobody had ever thought of that before, so nobody had ever tried it. (And there were plenty of birds who thought it was impossible.)

And it was hard, and uncertain—but the tiny bluebird tried anyway, and she succeeded. By eating up all the darkness, she made the bird world better.

And no more bad things happened to good birds anymore.

I look at the story and feel that familiar feeling of something both made-up and real. I wonder why that feels so good and always has. Maybe it’s just like the cloud shepherd said—that a story makes a space in the world that wasn’t there before, and that feels like the opposite of witches somehow.

I don’t know if it’s the story I’m supposed to write, and I don’t know how it will work—if it will shoot colors out behind it like my mom’s arrows, or do something else. I don’t know how to make my story into a dagger or a sword. But for now, even just writing it gives me hope.