Kaomai gave us three gifts. My mother gave Ailan and me only one: the quilt seamed from the past lives of the women I would one day become. Beneath the quilt, Ailan asked our mother,

“Did Kaomai stop loving us?” Her little face furrowed into the scowl that would follow her into adulthood.

“No,” Our mother said, brushing black curls from our foreheads and pressing her lips to them with a good night kiss. “Love is truth. Not even Kaomai can take the truth from us.”

Defiantly, standing over a woman I had left alive, I lifted my blood-stained fists.

 The crowd was angry. They had not gotten their way. But that did not stop them from the reaction that victory caused deep within them.

Wild as the day Kaomai created us, they roared.