Once upon a time there was a woman who spun exhaustion from the silver in her hair. She did this on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. She turned her attention to fatigue on Fridays. Saturdays were her day of rest, so she spun hope from the light scattered through a prism in the window. And Sundays were spent spinning life from fire.

It was her children who gathered sticks and logs for the blaze. The woman watched her many children darting about the woods, filling their arms with kindling. The youngest bundled the dry grasses for the flames to catch. Then the child found herself a tree to hug and she watched her mother create.

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The mother created animals from the fire and they roamed the forest. She spun squirrels and birds and a black panther who was certainly not tame but sat by the mother's side. She created puppies and kittens and mice and spiders and lizards who hugged the trees along with her daughter. The older children gathered when the fire was at its highest and she created them playmates who would last until the sun set, spinning them from the realm beyond the fire.

~~~

Once upon a time there was a girl with a mother who spun exhaustion and fatigue and hope and life. She watched her mother day by day and began to learn to spin as well. She had no silver threads in her hair, so she plucked those which shone red under the sun and spun delight. She spun delight daily, never tiring of it, until she had built a castle. She took her mother's spinning wheel and locked it in a tower of the castle, forcing her mother to spin no more.

The mother was relieved, but when Sunday came, the girl's older siblings were not pleased. They pounded on the castle door, claiming loneliness and despair so that their mother begged for her spinning wheel back. "I will spin them one last set of friends," she said.

But the daughter took the fine hair from her arms and spun clarity. She set it on the bridge of her mother's nose, and her mother was forced to see not just the sparkle in the walls of her daughter's castle, but the darkness of the exhaustion and fatigue outside. She saw her elder children clamoring and heard them begging for her to spin them friends from beyond the fire.

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"What will happen to them?" the mother asked her daughter. Because it struck her that her daughter was spun from what looked like heartbeats, but the siblings outside were spun from tears.

The daughter took a moment to feel her sadness. "They will dissolve," she whispered.

The mother ran to the door and screamed through it for her children. She told them to break the door down, to find their way inside. The outside world she had woven was fading. She could see the threads coming apart. Unlike her daughter's castle, the joy binding exhaustion and fatigue was not enough. Her daughter's castle was built of happiness. It bore the weight of crashing exhaustion. It hardly bent under fatigue. It absorbed the joy and shone like the sun. And the life--well, it wasn't life at all. The mother saw what she had been spinning on Sundays was false promises. She'd spun disappointment, illusion and, ultimately, despair.

~~~

Many of her children chased the fraying edges of the world until they themselves unraveled. That was when the mother saw they'd been spun not from memories, like the daughter beside her, but from grief of a future which never arrived.

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As her children were undone, the mother held her daughter close. She breathed in the summer scent of the lover she'd lost. She saw herself as she must have been: drained by loss, hopeless and unmoored. And she remembered her daughter's creation. Her daughter taking shape under a blue moon while the mother wished on a star to not be pained by her memories anymore. Her daughter had coalesced, and with her grief forgotten, she also forgot herself.

The woman opened her arms. Her daughter walked into them. The woman found the end of a thread. She looked into her daughter's eyes. "Thank you," she whispered before pulling. Her daughter burst into confetti. The woman breathed it in. This time she would hold her love inside her. She was grateful.

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