BENEATH THE SKIN

We do not know how the world was created. We do not know why it was created.

Yet, there have always been stories, myths, ideals. Each one of these was a symbol in which meaning was encoded, an attempt to answer the question of how and why.

As a child, a witch told me, just as she told all the children, that one by one, the gods had torn a piece of flesh from their body to form the world. When the gods took back what they gave, she said, the world would end.

—Qian, The Godless