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The Fingers stood together and thought hummed in a circle.  Together they chose to manifest and gently glimmered into form. The men pulled whole cloth from the autumnal fields in long swatches as they swayed side to side, arms harvesting, all naked and brown.  One sat and created clever pins out of antler and bone and the women set to braiding hair and cord.  .  Soon they were clothed and their simple gowns tied with swift spun wool plucked from mists and brambles. They marked their faces and feet with the ancient alphabets of protection symbols and geometries.

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They held their tools and gifts; a flagon, a bow, a magic flute, the hammer and sword and the mirror and comb, a large drinking cup made from a long curving horn. A drum.

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As they walked they began to sing, the first in the line holding her drum.  Along the way they collected fronds and berries, stones to chip and feathers to fletch, and once they all stopped on the edge of a brook to admire a lovely honeytree.  The tree sang to them, sang her name.  The Fingers recognized her Goddess heart full of bees and honey and sang her name until it became the name of the mountain behind her. 

 

When the song simmered into the rustle of leaves, the bees parted into two labial folds, revealing a pearl of honeycomb, richly laced with creamed honey. One of the women reached up with long slender hands and the bees laid the comb onto her marble cool palms. She held it like a butterfly. She thought-imagined back to them a welcome hum and learned from them the forage of the honey.  They sang the song about it and she learned it as her sister beside her learned the rhythm, in her way, her head cocked and eyes barely open fingers snapping and fluttering across the drum.  The Fingers danced.

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As sacrament, they each took a coin-sized morsel, wax, and all onto their tongues.  Ah, the sensual pleasures of mortality.  The moments of honey on the tongue, the glitter of sunlight on closed eyelids, The feeling of feet on the meadow and the marsh, the swish of skirt and slick of sweat, and each second following the next racing toward the end of the body.  A marvel, really, an inventive, vulnerable state, that strings moments, one from the next into the necklace weave of a lifetime,  The Fingers played with those moments, like beads on a tray. Singing the songs of ancestry, the Fingers fell more in love with the mortals around them.

 

Their hands stirred the air currents and poets far off in the valley below felt the trickle of poetry ripple down their necks, beckoned on the breeze.  Many others paused in their work, the hoe to rest, the sawyer stopping, the weavers' shuttle hushing.  The zephyr played the lyre that sat alone on a freshly washed, sunlit hearth. Babies drifted off the nipple, milk-drunk to dozing.

 

Kittens curled in sun-warmed hay and purred, fish hovered, slick and glittery in cold clean streams and birds cooed as they ruffled.  Faces throughout the town raised to the sky, as a collective breath kissed a thousand foreheads at once.

 

Not one heart was troubled, not one.

 

Juice turned to wine.