Another widely sprawling piece, "Creation Stories," just published by Twelve Winters, follows the travels of Sylvie and her young daughter Cory around the world collecting origin myths—until they both settle on the Big Island of Hawai'i, and creation takes a different twist.
"She traveled, tentatively at first as they had, to northern Arizona, Labrador (finding among the Cree stories they'd gathered there the 13-year-old's cri and cri de coeur), and Guatemala. She shared their love of Tunisia, and breathed in deeply, dipped both hands into the mounds of vivid spices they had photographed and painted in the souks. Liked that the Phoenician creation story Cory liked best had to do with Wind and Desire, and the Cosmic Egg, and that the whole time they were there they ate what they dubbed cosmic eggs—delicious chakchouka, eggs baked in a tomato sauce with harissa and sweet peppers. (Recipe included at the chapter's end.)
Kelly contemplated early Christianity with them ('in the beginning was the word') in Canterbury, home of England's first Cathedral; and prehistoric art (in the beginning were running horses and ochre bulls painted on deep cave walls) in France, the Occitaine. Stayed with them in their guest house with two bicycles on Awaji Island, Japan, said to have been created first of all the islands when drops of salt water crystallized, fell back into the ocean—the 'chaos under heaven'— from the tip of the jeweled spear that had been used to stir it.
She sympathized with Cory at nineteen, who'd come down with mono and felt awful most of the year. They hadn't ventured far as a result, but found a sunny apartment in Brooklyn and took the ferry to Ellis Island several times to make a study of beginnings there—the creation of new identities in a new world. Appropriate, Cory had said dully, her fever smoldering, as she emigrated into adulthood, suffered its peculiar sea-change."
