Flowers

As she bent down in the grass, he watched the sun glinting off her hair like novae brightening the galaxy for eons before their light reached thinking eyes. It was in these moments, now so hard to come by, that he knew humanity wasn't doomed as some cosmic accident that deserved whatever terrible catastrophe was just waiting its turn-that we all weren't just a naive mistake.

She picked a flower, a deep blue one, the name of which escaped him if he ever knew it at all.

"What is it, Papa?" she asked.

He just stared for a moment, marveling at how nature could produce two such perfect things.

"It's a flower, Honey," he answered, "though I don't know exactly what kind."

"How did it get here," she asked. "What does it do?"

"Hmm. Well, I guess it doesn't do much," he replied. "It attracts bees who use the nectar to make honey and it gives us something pretty to look at. But that's about it, I suppose."

"Why is it here, though?" she asked more directly.

It was a question that didn't have an easy answer. Why is anything here, really? What purpose do any of us breathing air have in the grand scheme of this infinite universe?

"That's a long story," he finally answered. "Do you want to hear it?"

"Yes, Papa," she said in her sweetest voice, which, when he thought about it, was the only voice she had.

"Okay," he said. "Let's sit down here and I will tell you all that I know. Would you like some water first?"

"Yes, Papa," she said, and he poured a bottle of water from his cooler into her sippy cup.

"It all started a long time ago. Long before you or I were here. Long before even Grandpa and Grandma were here."

"That's a long time isn't it, Papa," she said.

He kissed her on top of the head. "A very long time," he agreed.

"At first, there was nothing. Well, not nothing exactly, there was a very tiny ball of energy. So tiny that you couldn't even see it. But it weighed more than an elephant. It weighed more than anything you could think of, really. All around it was absolute quiet. Like your room at night when the sound machine's batteries go out."

"That's scary, Papa," she said.

"It can be," he said. "But it doesn't last, does it? We always get it running again."

"You and Mama?" she asked.

"Me and Mama," he replied. "Well, everything kind of started that way. And I'm sure it was scary at first, but there wasn't anyone around who could be afraid. Nothing had happened yet. Then, that tiny little ball, so small, even smaller than you, blew up, and suddenly there was everything. There was gas and matter and energy flying all over the place. It took a long time for any of it to become anything, but eventually, a tiny speck of it became the planet we live on."

"And then, a great being, who had started all of this in the first place, saw our little planet and decided it was boring and lifeless and that it should be full of life and love and a whole bunch of other stuff."

"Like flowers?" she said.

"We're getting there," he replied, smiling.

"At first, all he could make was scary things, like dinosaurs. He made those for millions of years before he decided they were not quite right for our world and he erased everything like you with your etch-a-sketch. He just shook everything off the planet and got ready to start again. But, he didn't want to make scary things anymore, so he waited. While he waited, he forgot to turn the sun back on and the whole planet got covered in ice. You could walk around the entire globe there was so much ice. It saved a lot of money in airfare."

"That's silly, Papa," she said.

"You're right. Travel back then was free and you didn't need a special ID."

"Papa."

"Okay, okay," he said. "Back to the story. After the ice melted, the world was blue and green. The sky was blue and all the water was blue and all the land was green. He thought there should be more colors, so he gave the sky clouds and the water depths and those helped add slightly different colors to things. But the land was a different story. He added deserts and mountains. He broke up the green as best he could, but he still felt that something was missing. There were still only a few colors in the world and he'd really only changed the lightness and darkness of them. He needed more colors."

"Like the rainbow?" she asked.

"Did you read ahead?" he asked. "Exactly like a rainbow. He didn't know about those other colors though, so again, he waited."

"Then, one day it started to rain over his mountains and after it cleared, he saw the first rainbow that had ever been."

"That's what this world is missing," he said in a voice that shook the heavens. "All the colors of that rain.....bow."

"He went about making things in every color of the rainbow. Purple mountains, amber grains, skies of every hue. He even made water that was green. And he crowned all he had made with flowers. But, there was still something missing. There was nobody to see all these colors but Him. So, he made people. And people made a lot of other things. Not all of it good. But they had permission now to make pretty much anything they desired so they went about it. For thousands of years, people made people. And they made things. Things for hunting, things for gathering, things for helping, things for hurting. They were the only ones making things anymore. But they could never make anything as beautiful as the simplest thing made by Him and that saddened Him. He decided that he would make one last thing for the world that was beautiful and that no matter what people did to each other, there would always be this one perfect thing."

"Flowers, Papa?" she asked.

"He'd already made flowers," he said. "But he needed someone to pick them."