Tonight Leo has knocked over Grandpa's jar of marbles, and they've rolled into every corner of the room. He feels like he wrecks everything he touches. So Grandpa tells him how the night sky got its stars, back when somebody dropped the whole lot at once.

A story for any child who's made a mess and feels terrible about it, and for the grown-up helping them pick up the pieces.

For children 4 to 8, and whoever sits beside them.

Coyote and the Stars comes from the Navajo (Diné) people, who tell of how the stars were placed in the sky. In the old story, a careful maker, First Woman, or sometimes Black God, hangs the stars one by one in patterns to guide the people, until Coyote, who could never wait for anything, flings the whole bag into the night and scatters them everywhere. It's a story for why the sky is full of more stars than anyone could count, and why a great river of them, the Milky Way, spills across the dark. We've kept Coyote's impatience and the careful patterns he lost, and told it with no one punished.