World Weavers

If one said her grandma was strange and there would be a dozen people in the small village of Nara that would smile and agree, able to recall the time she had based all her outfits after children's books for a month for the third graders she taught or the time she knitted stars for those that had been in her book club longer than any of her children had been alive.

She passed the way everyone wants to go, a quiet Sunday morning in the retirement home after her son and daughter had spent the night before drinking cocoa and laughing about warm sunny days and how many times their mother had held a potato to their foot at the first sight of a bee sting.

Cara hadn't been there for her last moments, she'd been packing up her college dorm and sketching into the late hours of the night. When she had woken it was to a single call from her mom and a dozen text from her father that told her of grandma's passing.

Now she stood looking up at the old cabin with the stairs she remembered tripping down and the kitchen that had the smell of banana bread baked into the wood.

It had been six months since anyone had entered it, she told her parents she'd clean it up before they and her aunt showed up to decide what to do with their childhood home. The dust would hopefully distract her from the fact she was out of college now and had no job to show for it.

A cluster of stars was carved into the top of the doorway that she rubbed at with her fingers, she hadn't been able to reach the last time she had visited.

The cabin wasn't in need of much cleaning with how tidy her grandma had been, the only thing that showed any sense of clutter was the dining room table she had chosen to display her craft if the splayed out colored pencils and earmarked sketchbooks were any indication.

With all the pencils up off the floor and table, bound together with a rubber band and stored away in the plastic bin, she could move to stacking all the loose papers together to allow some kind of order in the chaos that had been her grandma's creation.

From the bottom of her looming tower of earmarked books was a familiar spine with a crayon drawn white figure that looked like a cloud but was nothing similar to the ghost it was supposed to be.

It was her grandma's sketchbook of fables and myths that she had all crammed into a little black notebook that still stood up to time, the worn cover and yellowed pages showed its age.

Her father had grown up being told the same stories held in those pages that she had; when she had been a child he always insisted the tales couldn't come from him, that only his mother could do them justice.

The chair creaked as she sat and tried to wiggle out the bottom book without sending the rest of them tumbling.

She failed.

Well, if she left it scattered across the table and floor in favor of thumbing through the book she held first she knew her grandma wouldn't begrudge her of that.

There was one story she was looking for, it had been not been the story of the old man who used his own rib bone for leatherworking that her father favored or the whispering toadstools that told secrets to fairies her aunt loved, but the story of the world weavers.

At not quite the end but far from the middle was a drawing of a being, its big looming form made up of a haze of charcoal and metallic ink to resemble the burning brightness of the stars it held inside it. In the beings hands cradled a colored pencil world outlined in gold.

The first time she had heard the story there had been no drawings that her grandma's words breathed into, as much as she loves the drawings in her hands the first telling of the story will always be her favorite.

One night her grandma brought her out to the back porch and tucked them both under her tacky yellow blanket to look up at the stars, "My father used to tell me a story of world weavers, bright beings both light and dark who shaped and created the world before humans decided it would be theirs."

Cara could of swore the stars twinkled as if in recognition of this tale and she had listened to both the sky and her grandma's words, "Now they watch over us, observing what use we make of the world they gave us."

She'd been confused, "I thought you said humans took it?"

Her grandma's wheezing laughter shook them both, "Oh Cara, if world weavers can create entire worlds, how would something as simple as humans be able to take away something from such a large presence? What would stop them from simply creating a world without humans?"

"So they created us? They gave us a world so they could see what we do?"

Fingers had run through her hair, catching in the knots, "The story goes that humans are all the children of world weavers and that this place is a place to love, learn, and grow as many times as is necessary for us to become world weavers ourselves."

In a child's mind the idea of reincarnation was but a vague picture, but Cara tried to put it into words, "Then bad people get reincarnated until they become good? And good people leave this world to become world weavers and look over their own humans?"

She had gazed up at the sky as if she stared long enough she could see them, an unseen being just out of reach that she feared if she blinked she would miss them.

Her grandma's eyes had been warm and her smile understanding, maybe she too had looked for world eaters from her father's lap hoping to catch a glimpse.

"Not exactly, remember I said world weavers could be light or dark? There has to be a balance, chaos wouldn't be chaotic if there was no peace to oppose it and light couldn't be defined as light if darkness didn't exist."

Cara hadn't thought it right that bad people got to be world weavers but her grandma's words had stuck with her, "I think humans get reincarnated again and again until they feel they've done everything they could. A bad person could die feeling at peace with his decisions just as a good person could regret. When they've accepted that the time they've been given on earth is over, when they've accepted death, that's when a human becomes a world weaver."

Back then, her mother had argued it was a morbid story to teach a child and her father had explained that it wasn't morbid, it taught that every being had a place in this world and that there could be life after death, that life could begin again if you weren't ready.

It was meant to bring comfort to children who thought death was a evil and cruel thing.

If you didn't want to die, you could be reborn and start anew with new memories and experiences and if you were ready to move on you could join the other world weavers, both ancestors and friends who had also found peace at death.

Cara wanted to think her grandma was now a world weaver, that her family and friends had made her so happy in what time she had in this life that when she passed it was with surety that the world could go on without her.

Her grandma was stubborn like that, made decisions and took off without a backwards glance with only her cackling heard in the distance as the rest of them fretted over making the all the wrong choices and accidentally stumbling over the right ones.

In three stacks she organized the rest of the sketchbooks, the small black one tucked into the pocket of her cardigan right beside her own tiny book of make believe.

As she dusted and washed the linens an idea settled into her mind, from grandpa's old workshop of leather and tools to the maze of mushroom drawings, figures, and carvings that lined the hallway, this cabin told a story.

In the bedrooms little monsters followed at your feet, creatures her grandparents had painstakingly carved into the wood back when they were younger and could safely get down without needing the help up. The ceilings had a galaxy of shimmery metallic stars in a sea of black in the same ink from the book and even the windows had prism designs of fairies peeking in at the corners.

This house was alive, even if no one no longer lived it in.

When her family showed up the next day she told them her idea, they could turn the cabin into a little museum of sorts. Their family wasn't the only one to grow up hearing her stories, she had taught at the elementary school for thirty years and the size of her funeral showed how loved she was.

People who had moved across states had come to visit her in her final months, past students who brought their children just to meet the woman who always spent an hour of class every Friday telling stories.

She had the time and with the twenty grand left to her in the will she had the money to buy a few things to display her grandma's art, she'd leave out a few sketchbooks to be flipped through but most of the house would be left as is, a peak into her grandma's chaotic curiosity.

While that was going on she had an plan for her grandma's smallest sketchbook and her favorite story that lay inside it.

She had majored in art, carefully cultivated under her coloring sessions with her mom as a child and her grandma's stories that could bleed creativity into even the most dull of characters.

Cara wasn't going to let the story of the world weavers end up buried and gathering dust in some no name town between lost and found; she was going to tell the story of the beings that shaped the world, that wove souls into existence, breathed life into the babbling brooks, and sneezed trees so big they could reach the clouds.

Her grandma might of left this world, but her story wasn't over.