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I'm on crack. I mean, it's fun crack, I'm having a ball, but yeah. I'm a total nutter.

Why The Sky Is Blue
by Hetre Z

Some time ago, before paper and pens and letters, but about when numbers were first being born, the Sky wasn't blue like it is now. Earth was flat all around; she had no trees and few shrubs, and was just a smooth plain of grass with ponds, like round mirrors on green velvet backing. Sky was a perfect disk above her, and wherever flowers grew Sky would take the color of those flowers, yellow like buttercups and blue like forget-me-nots, and the sickly purple of black-eyed Susans, so that when you looked up it was like a garden laid out flat and curved over the plain green Earth. Sky was vain, and a little petty, and wouldn't let a day go by without mocking Earth.

"Aren't you bored?" it would ask, shifting from blue-green to orange and back. "Always the same color, always the same shape. If I were nothing but green all the time, I'd go hide somewhere until people forgot about me." And Earth would grow mold-colored lichens and violently pink cabbage roses, and Sky would change color with them, looking like the inside of a roller rink, and completely forget about Earth with admiring itself in all the lakes and ponds.

Earth and Sky had been born at around the same time, and had grown up together, so Earth was used to Sky's name-calling and vanity. But as time passed, Earth began to have children of her own, little creatures who admired her; squirrels who buried acorns between her fingers, and horses who rolled on her grass and laughed, and people, who called her "Mother" and worshipped her, and said she was beautiful, and she started to think that maybe she was beautiful, after all. Sky saw how much her children loved her, and became jealous.

"You don't deserve them," it said. Tiger-lily stripes crawled over it, and there was a little burst of orchid purple in one corner.

"I made them," Earth said, patient with Sky as always, but still hurt and angry. "They love me."

"They only say that because you give them food and water. I give them something to look at. I give them beauty. The sun comes up each day and they stare at me, they just look and look, and they can't stand to look at you. If I wasn't here, I think they might all leave."

Earth, for all her patience, had as bad a temper as Lightening, her father, and just now she looked, really looked at Sky, for the first time in ages, and she smiled. Sky looked back at her, sneering, with bright regal colors running along the edges where it met Earth. As it watched, though, Earth changed; the grass started rising up in little nubs, getting higher and higher, until the nubs were higher than a man. As Sky watched, the dirt and grass peeled off, layer by layer, until there was nothing but rock underneath, and the rock kept getting higher and higher and higher. And the higher the rocks got, the sharper their points became, and the smaller Sky had to be to make room for them, not wanting to get cut on the rocks as they went up and up. At one point there was a half-mile of empty space between the rocks (mountains, now) and the bottom of the Sky, and Sky was turning red with the effort of holding itself up that high.

"You could apologize," Earth said, but Sky was too busy holding its toes up to listen.

The Earth didn't move, and the Sky didn't move, for three days. They just stood there, glaring at each other. Finally the Earth shrugged, and said, "If you come down, I'll lower the mountains. But you have to come down first." So Sky lowered its feet down until they touched the tips of the mountains, and then lower until its ankles rested on them, and there were little phosphorescent bits of sky held in the crevices. They were the first mirages, later to be pulled out onto the desert by the stormclouds, but first they lived in the corners of the mountains.

Earth started to bring the mountains down, and as they came they snagged on the bottom edges of the Sky, and started dragging it down with them, and Sky shouted "No, wait. Stop!" Earth stopped pulling the mountains down, and tried to untangle Sky, but she only succeeded, whether intentionally or not, in attaching the edges of Sky more firmly to the mountains. So firmly, in fact, that Sky had trouble breathing, crowded as it was into a too-small space, and knotted in tangles at the bottom, and it turned blue from lack of air. No matter what Earth or Sky did to try to free Sky's feet from the mountains, they stayed firmly stuck together, and that's why, today, the sky meets the mountains, and also why the sky is blue.