Mary Cassatt Young Mother Sewing

street, turned his face to the sky and hissed. 'Tell me what you can see!'
Gern squinted.
'I can see the stars, master,' he said.
'What are they on, boy?'
Gern relaxed slightly. 'That's easy, master. Everyone knows the stars are on the body of the goddess Nept who arches She was enormous, her statistics interstellar. The shadow between her galactic breasts was a dark nebula, the curve of her stomach a vast wash of glowing gas, her navel the seething, dark incandescence in which new stars were being born. She wasn't supporting the sky. She was the sky.
Her huge sad face, upside down on the turnwise horizon, stared directly herself from . . . oh, bloody hell.' 'You can see her, too?' 'Oh, mummy,' whispered Gern, and slid to his knees. Dil nodded. He was a religious man. It was a great comfort knowing that the gods were there. It was knowing they were here that was the terrible part. Because the body of a woman arched over the heavens, faintly blue, faintly shadowy in the light of the watery stars.