There is a wall for our family's skins, deep within our den. Mother's is striped with tigers' eyes, gleaming red and gold; father's is the colour of quartz. Two more hang below, dusk-gray, wrapped in silk; I am too small for mine, and you are too small for yours. Each morning we run up to the wall and measure our height against the hooks, and each time we fall back, giggling, for each of us think ourselves taller than the other. We want to step into our skins, we tell Mother to let us go. But she has slipped into hers, and she is a pillar of fire, fearsome as day. She must hunt, and we cannot, she tells us. We must be good in her absence.

Every morning, the doors of the den open for her, and her alone. We have tried dancing around them, practicing nimble leaps from the countertop; but they close too fast to follow. Nor do they open to strength or cunning. Many a time you have dressed up our skins in mud and sticks, inventing all manner of puppetry; many a time you have tried at them with bites and powerful kicks. But the doors remain shut. I suspect, like the skins, that we are still too small for this world.

You do not agree. You think we share our Mother's fire, that the world does not burn so bright as to leave us out of it. You think, pressing your ears to the walls, you can hear the heat calling, calling as it does to Mother; you tell me that we are born to run in it, jump in it, hunt in it. Oh sister, I do not share your cunning, or your passion for the heat, but how can I tell you that when your eyes burn so, or flicker so excitedly to the light behind the doors when she returns? I am our father's child, of the dirt and the damp; I do not run or jump, but keep my body close to the ground. You are our mother's, and the world sings to you in your sleep.

The day comes, when she tells us to stay, that you can take her heat no longer. Who was she to keep you inside from the world that loved you so? You plunge for her neck, snarling; the skin bends but does not break. She is a pillar of fire, unapproachable. When she leaves, you are sprawled before the door, hissing smoke between your teeth. You do not let me tend to your wounds. You say that I am a coward, that I hold too dear the memory of father not to fight. I think that we are too small for the world, which is why I do not fight.