My grandmother’s house smells like soap and buttered toast this morning. She has dishes soaking in the sink. The sink. She still washes her dishes in the sink. A little brown girl is watching the toast. She has the earth in her. There is mud in her veins, and gold dust in her muddy hair, and there are emeralds in her muddy eyes. Clear emeralds, held up to the sun so that sometimes they’re green and sometimes they’re gold and they change so often that eventually you forget what color they were to begin with. The little brown girl is, I think, like a tree. She is tall, nearly as tall as my grandmother, and thin. Her arms and legs are like spiders’ arms and legs, except that she only has two each. She is a fresh sapling, but sometimes when she looks at you she is withered and ancient. While she runs she is young. She is fast, and when she runs I think she is more like the wind than a tree. She is green and cool and new. When she is still everything about her stills. She twists and changes. She is plain and muddy, and her feet aren’t quite right, like roots itching to be ripped out of the earth and set to running again.

“The toast is done.” My grandmother says to the muddy girl, as she puts it on a yellow plate that I think must have been white once. One side of the bread is brown, like the girl, but not as brown. The other side is golden yellow, like her eyes at that moment. Gold eyes. My grandmother gives the little golem a yellow cup that I think must have been white once. Its handle is broken, but the girl isn’t afraid of sharp edges. She is rock.

She spoons out cinnamon and sugar from the cup with sharp edges and dumps it on her toast, tiny brown and white crystals forming little pyramids with every inch the splendor of the real ones. At least you can eat these. I tell her that each little speck of sugar could be another little world. She laughs and takes a bite with teeth made of diamond, and tells me that other little worlds taste good. She laughs like a mountain.

Now it smells like soap and toast and cinnamon and sugar.

The little girl made out of earth runs, because she does not know how to walk. After all, whoever heard of a tree that could walk? But she can run, and she does. She runs outside with a mouthful of other little worlds and we find her up a tree, talking to a bug. The bug is named Ceecee.
No she says It’s C.C. With the little dots in between. C.C. has to go home, and the girl who is made of earth must come down from the tree. She laughs again and drops a piece of toast. Other little worlds scatter on the ground. Ants will pick them up and take them home, and then they will be part of the ants’ world. I watch the ants for a while, thinking about ant math. If that ant is A and is one centimeter long, and that lumpy piece of clumped together sugar it is carrying is B and is two and one half centimeters long, and there are nine thousand-ninety-nine-hundred and two ants in the ant hill(call them A1), and a leaf(call it C) falls upside down three inches from the ant hill, and the wind, named D, blowing at about three miles per hour(and remember to convert it to ant speeds), blows the leaf two inches toward the ant hill, and the ants become confused for about a minute and a half before remembering how to walk around things, then how much sugar do you have to eat to turn into an ant?
I can't figure it out without a calculator.
The girl is telling the tree a secret. I can tell because it's blushing. I tell her it's time to come down. She tells me to stand back. She is going to fly.
The muddy girl is not afraid to fall. She is not afraid to fly. Gold  and emeralds and mud and trees and diamonds cannot fly, I tell her.
But the wind can.
The tree, an old friend, lets go of her, and she flies into my arms. We go inside to get some more sugar. She asks me if I like the way the world tastes.

My grandmother says not to track mud in the house, so I carry her. I don’t mind getting dirty.