He was born in the rendezvous of a clap of thunder
and a shooting star, fully grown and bigger than
a mountain. When they asked him who he was,
he said, A Wanderer, and when they asked where
he came from, he said, She left me, and no more.

But he was ravenous, ate splintering trees with all
their monkeys and birds and lizards, then washed
them down with murky rivers teeming with fish and
frogs and crocodiles. Soon the once-green valley was
a bony desert, and still he wanted more, so he cracked
his teeth on salty boulders, then swept his fingers
across the soil, creating massive tributes to his hunger-
fueled ruin in the soil and licking the grit off of each
digit, savoring the bitter zest of his destruction.

And when his throat was caked, they pointed to
the ocean, and he ran—an earthquake—to the
gloomy deep. He made himself a bed down there
of slime and old shipwrecks, slurping squid
and jellyfish until the day that she comes back.