When I met her, she told me she was going up the mountain to talk to the star that had recently taken up residence there. She didn’t know exactly where it was. Some said it was caught in the branches of the grandmother tree, lighting up the needles with incandescent love. Other reported encountering the star in a cave, as though it had had enough of the enormous freedom of interstellar space, trading it for the chthonic security of glittering crystal walls and limestone draperies formed by centuries of patient water.

But she didn’t care where she found the star. It was just that the fires of the village could no longer satisfy her. From the hearth fire of her home, into which she plunged her hands as if to wash them of essential guilt, only to withdraw them unscathed, she graduated to the blacksmith’s forge, blown white-hot by the labor of sweating boys, but neither could it cleanse her. Even the traveling magician’s arc-lamp, buzzing interrupter and spluttering electric fire, was not enough.

So she left the village at daybreak, by the new light of a star she couldn’t reach, to seek out one who’d come to earth, perhaps only for her, now within reach. But what if, it too, was not hot enough?