The child and the madwoman have been here before, a half dozen times or so. Some days, when she leaves school, she walks home indirectly. The currents of an autumn day send the child off her path, swirling down the street with the piles of fallen leaves. A small trail diverts her through salal and sitka, a patch of forest between street and seaside. She comes to the viewpoint over the ocean, a place where a great mass of basalt defies the water’s edge, breaking thousands and thousands of waves. Every day the waves return, each hoping to be the one that will finally wear the monolith away. A decrepit cedar fence holds the child away from the abyss, while a sign can barely be made out under years of scratching and salt. And then there is the madwoman. 

          The child believed at first that the woman was insane, sitting as she does in old, ragged clothing beside a small campfire no matter the day when the child visits. She has two cats, which usually nestle into her lap or play about the fire, and she is strangely, inexplicably beautiful. She murmurs to herself, and this was what made the child assume at first she was lost, one of the people her dad always tells her to avoid, always tells her are nothing but drugs and danger. But the first time the child rounded the corner, she saw the woman holding her hands in her fire, being part of the fire without being harmed, and she knew something else was afoot. 

          The child is smart. She knows things that adults forget, like that you’re as likely to find a God on the coast of Oregon as you are to find one anywhere else in the world. Athens or Astoria, Jerusalem or Port Orford, indeed, Babylon or Neawanaka; all are liable to host moments of divinity, if you’re willing to watch. So she keeps coming back. Sometimes the woman asks her a question, a simple one. Today starts as such a day: 

          “Your dad loves you?” says the madwoman, as the child walks unafraid into the clearing. This must be the fourth or fifth time. 

           The child is surprised by the question. “Of course,” she replies. The madwoman grunts for a moment and then asks: 

          “Do you know where you’re standing?” 

          “My dad told me this whole town is one huge piece of rock. It used to be a big mountain, but now the sea is washing it away,” says the child, eagerly. She is very proud of this knowledge. One day she wants to look at the great mountains her dad tells her are hidden under the ocean’s surface. 

           “Mm. Half right,” says the madwoman. There is a pause as she strokes one of her cats. Eventually she offers: “It was a big person actually, a giant.” Realizing the child is still listening raptly. “You’re sitting on its bones,” she continues after a moment. “They were so big and heavy that when I killed him they fell in a pile and dirt fell over them. It looked like a mountain. Your scientists know it’s bones under there, they just don’t want to admit it. Too embarrassing.” 

            There is a long pause. This is the most the child has ever heard the woman speak at once. 

            “I’m tired, kid. It’s been thousands of years since then, and I’ve been running cycles and cycles of destruction and restoration…” she trailed off again, staring out to sea. The child remembers her dad trying to explain climate change to her a few days ago, remembers that the ocean is slowly rising and one day her home could be underwater. The woman turns back to the fire, “They threw me into flames when I first appeared. Three times, and each time I rose again and they burned me over and over, destroying what they couldn’t control.” She sighs and shakes her head, lost in thought then turns back to the child. 

           “What do you know about the end of the world, kid?” 

             The child thinks about this. Some part of her is still not confident that this strange woman isn’t mad or on drugs or something like that. This part of her is boring, and wants to grow up to have an expensive taste in wine, and to believe what it reads in a newspaper. The rest of her, the part that matters, senses that something terribly important is happening on that day, something that has happened many thousands of times before, and that will happen many thousands of times again, until the sun gets all big and swallows the earth like her teacher told her will happen one day. 

            “The world ends when…” starts the child. She stumbles, finding her thoughts. “It ends when the sun expands and devours it, or when people blow it up with bombs, or when a big asteroid hits it, but that’s all millions and millions of years away. Until then, I think it keeps going unless we give up.” 

              And the woman laughs. She stands up for the first time since the child has met her. Her cats untangle themselves at her feet and shake themselves. 

            “Good answer, kid,” says the woman. “Remember this day. The apocalypse starts in the heart. Everyone’s always looking for the big fight, the end of time, Ragnarok. But it’s really about twilight. I think Götterdämmerung was the better translation. It’s not the fire and monsters and asteroids that’ll get you. It’s the despair. Do you understand?” 

             And the child nods, even though she does not understand at all, and will not for many years, until she is a young woman and she begins to have dreams where a great snake coils around her heart, circling around and around with its tail in its mouth, until she plants a seed in her garden and days later it becomes a tree, until she falls shrieking into a flame but does not burn. The child will never see the madwoman again. What she sees now is a woman of wisdom beyond words, beauty beyond description, power beyond imagination. 

           “Good,” says the goddess. She nods back, steps into her chariot, and leashes her giant cats. They fly her up and away, cats, chariots, and goddess flying directly into the eye of the setting sun.