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small circle of land as our entire universe, so long as we are safe here.
    I was worried that we weren’t offering anything. “What would God want from us, to prove our love?” I asked. The butcher suggested sacrificing a goat, the banker suggested charity. I thought maybe God was simply lonely, by himself for all eternity at the top of the sky. “Maybe he just wants to be told a good story,” I said. And that is what we promised to give him.
    If we were going
to have God, then we were going to need a temple for Him. The greatest temple ever built. The shape of that place, the glory of it, kept us talking for hours. So that the room would be flooded with the very first light of day, huge windows would face east. And others west, because the day’s end is sometimes even more spectacular than its beginning. My sister wanted to have a small pool to throw things into. The healer wanted to have a hole in the roof to leave a way in for the dead. The two oldest men wanted to cover the floor in soft feathers so we could pray lying down. Igor suggested there be someone to watch the children.
    The second thing God did after inventing the earth was to invent the heavens. We had made the earth, and now we would make the sky. We would paint constellations on the ceiling of the temple, white against a background of blackest blue. The temple rose high above us, a misty vision so sparkling and grand we felt drunk. How could our God not fall in love with us?
    “It sounds handsome,” my mother said. “Gold and all that. But the world started again because we wanted a safer place. A more deliberate place. How do we make sure we don’t forget that? How will we keep track of the story? Wasn’t that going to be our big offering?”
    Several people sulked—they were having fun sculpting great ivory balustrades and now they had to deal with the microscopic machinery of meaning. The mist of the temple dispersed and the room became quiet.
    The chicken farmer figured we could write down the things we did each day. The jeweler pointed out that we might end up with a very complete accounting of the minutiae without ever knowing what happened in any bigger sense. Laundry would be on record but not faith. The stranger was braiding the fringe from the blanket around her shoulders. She looked up from this task and gave the slightest nod to the jeweler, whose face turned red.
    Igor thought we should interview one another.
    I wondered if we should gather each week and write the story of what had taken place.
    “We write down everyone’s prayers,” the stranger said. “Someone listens.”
    “We might miss some of the events,” the banker said.
    “I vote that this world is about hopes more than events,” my mother breathed. And so it would be. We voted to build a comfortable chair and a desk for the recorder to sit at, and we agreed that one of us would be there to listen, quietly writing down every prayer each of us uttered. There would be no interruption, no answers or questions.
    “And what if we pray when we are in our kitchens or walking in the snow?” we wondered.
    “We should listen to one another even then. If you hear a prayer, write it down and take it to the temple. We can have a box to put them in.”
    “I think we need all the languages,” I said, thinking of the Russian my father sometimes spoke, the German the butcher carried on in, the Spanish, the Yiddish, the Italian, the Romanian, the Hebrew. “If praying is how we keep track, we should have a lot of words to wish with.”
    “As long as we forget where they came from,” the stranger said. I promised I already had.
    “Do we need protections?” my brother asked. “Do we need a wall or a shield?”
    “No,” I corrected. “We are the only thing that exists. Us and God.”
    We were tired by the time it grew dark. It was our first day and we had done a lot. But we had not thought ahead to this moment when the sky turned purple and we were hungry and wanted sleep.