“Long ago, a goddess shed a tear for her lost daughter,” the elderly woman says, nodding and rocking in her old gnarled chair, “that drop… that drop landed here.”

The drop, well it was made of gold and diamond. It rolled down the beautiful goddess’ cheek and trickled down to the earth, where it landed on a hard blackened rock beside the riverbed.

The woman, young then, picked it up out of curiosity, and studied the golden droplet, the size of her palm.

“And I knew, I knew it was different. So I kept it. Oh, I didn’t sell it like you silly bastards would. No, I put it in a mason jar beside my bed,” the woman explains to her daughter.

“Then I fell in love with your father, a hunk of a man, with beautiful eyes that danced and a laugh that made me… well, I don’t know what it made me. But it made me do a lot. So, we decided to have a child of our own, that’s what happens when two people truly love each other.”

As the woman lay in bed that night, after they’d made love, she stared at the golden droplet as it shimmered in the moonlight. It pulsed once, a low thrum that rattled the jar a little.

She thought is was weird, but nothing more. She rolled over, pulled her lover close, and slept.

“And then,” the old woman says, “well then it thrummed again. On the day I gave birth to you, my dear.”

Back in these days, hospitals were optional to have a baby. Most didn’t have to money, so the baby came as it wanted, right there in the home.

The lady had gone into labor while walking to her bedroom. The baby had been making a fuss all day, the woman never expected her to want out of the warm womb.

So, the woman tried to calm herself and sat on the bed. Her husband came running, after hearing the nervous pants and quiet groans.

“He asked me what was wrong. I told him the baby was coming,” the old woman laughs, “you weren’t here yet, but you should’ve saw that bastards face. All the blood had gone to his toes, and his mouth was open.”

The woman entered that stage of horrific pain, where everything hurts. The man helps her through, a ghost at the edge of the bed.

Later, while the woman is feeding her baby on the bed, the orb thrums again.

“It was louder. It shook my lamp right off the bedside table. The jar went right with it, danced right off the table and onto the floor,” the woman holds up the droplet, which she has attached to a neckless.

“Why have you kept it all this time?” Her daughter asks, reaching out to the old woman’s extended hand.

“Because it spoke to me like a good friend, you don’t throw those out with the garbage, now do you?”

“What am I to do with it?”

“Keep it. One day, it will speak to you, as it did me. It guided me, it will guide you.”

The woman believes the goddess helped her through having a child, because the goddess could not. So is true, the small golden and diamond droplet looks upon several generations.