Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  I leaned on one hip, exhaustion covering me like a lead shield. “I heard. I hear. It is no different than the Gospel of the Hare or the Gospel of Ice-Fishing. Everyone has another useless revelation.”

  “But it is different. Can’t you see it through and through? I have heard those Gospels and they are false prophets. They are cheap copies. Truth lies with the Man and Revelation in his Bar.” The creature inched towards me, his fat green body swaying from side to side, black eyes roving over me like sweaty hands. “I’m not surprised. We Crocodiles are spiritually pure. We can hold the Gospel in our mouths. Can’t expect a little thing like you to grasp the higher registers. Your mouth is too small.”

  “I try, I try to understand the manifest and the invisible. I Devour. I Seek, I Walk.”

  “Of course you do, precious thing, of course.” He sidled up to me and pushed his emerald head up under my hand like a cat. “No one blames you. It’s just not how you’re made. White as paper you are—well, what’s paper for but writing on? And the paper knows nothing about it, can’t go about reading itself. Just so, you can’t be asked to know my Gospel any more than the number of my scales. If I had hands I might scribble a bit on you myself. Such sweet skin.” He gestured in a friendly manner with his slick reptilian legs. “You just keep on as you are. Downdowndown. You haven’t found your true Author yet—not like my own radiant self and the radiant Man. There is one that will cover you in ink like a hand. Until then you’re just a river without a bank, rushing and crashing and flooding with no ocean to devour you. To gobble you up. Wish it could be me. If you could touch but the outer rim of the golden meaning of the Man and the Bar, the first layer like a crystal onion, you would be saved. If you could only understand that there is only one Man, and only one Bar, and they walk into each other, and they are the same. These are High Mysteries. But no! No one expects you to be pure like we are, pretty girl. Why, no!” He looked at my hips smugly, his marble eyes preening. “But whether you grip it in your little white hands or not, a Man walked into a Bar, and it was a fine day.”

  The Crocodile ambled away, humming a little, slogging through the sparkling pitch with the sun pooling on his back like thick rope.

  10

  I see.

  Shoeless in the cunning morn, under sky’s wet wings, blackness of the huntress-night faded to denim blue, old washed jeans hung out to dry in the rain-scrubbed air, knees torn open to reveal a blaze of dawn. Another day, it goes on and on, ever faster around a dying sun. Things have changed, they never change. Have I never seen another creature, Hare nor Angel nor Man nor Bar in the nevertime of my tenancy here? It is possible, I could not say. Memory is full of back-folds and hidden levers, my origami-crane mind, creased upon itself, blankness crushed into Form. It is equally possible I have seen and spoken and trembled before them a thousandthousandthousand times before. It flows together. I shrug underneath it, the dilated copper of the Road and the Journey re-settles on my muscled shoulders. I accept. If there is a new thing in this place, its newness may be mine. Longago but also tomorrow and Thursdaynext I lost the grasp of solid hand on happenstance.

  There is something. It appears suddenly and without golden trumpets. It is not threatening, it does not speak. This is a relief. From the terrible cisterns of memory I excavate a name for this silvershimmer thing I find on the inner curve of a dead-end Wall. Mirror. Copper snakes raven each other around its polished surface, gnashing teeth like guillotines. Asphodel twines through their tangled bodies, pike-branches piercing the thick serpent-flanks. I approach, because it does not move or hiss. Deadwood-drift I on its silvered Sea, azure ether of reflection wreathes my face. And the hieroglyphs of the Angel’s hand which seemed so radiant leaping like enthralled fish under her fingers are now surly and vulgar, wide swaths of grease staining, avenues of gaping black wounds, fury of childish lizard-scribblings biting into body, slime-tracks of some unimaginable worm, foul soup of rotten tempura tearing obscenity from unthinking skin. My flesh her possession she scrawled in wordless barnacled umbilici, each downstroke of pen a penetrating blade, spurt of reeking ink over breasts and belly, navel filled up with grotesque swirl of jet, hair streaked with toad-skins, the snowy peaks of curls hidden in sightless amphibian eyes, paints clattering over me like a kettle of festering squid, eating the white and pale with their horn-beaks, destroying, destroying.

  I can see reflected her horrid watercolors seeping into me like poisoned semen, defacing the Walls of my womb with angry graffiti, splatter of mucus-paint and ravening teeth tearing bloody chunks away, like a crumbling Wall, vandalizing my uterine Wall with obscenities drawn in fouled india ink and tongue scrapings, the ravening hawk, the gaping earth. Streaking the mouth with the oil of octopus eyes. For only the eyes remain, horror-blank, the erasure of iris, pure white as rice paper and saki-cups. I wept and screeched with that ruined mouth, owl-rage filled up with razored feathers. Betrayed into monstrosity. Hic monstra delitescunt. Milky tears seeped from my blasted eyes like sap.

  (—Dare frame, dare frame thy, Dare clasp—)

  Mirror. Threads of voice and fennel like capillaries, invading my mind, refracted words from a beforetime I know has never been. Curse I all things. Mirror-eyes full of reptilian venom, green scales clinking like armor, full of unanswerable ecclesiasts. Despair rises up in its terrible bubbling laugh again as I fall, head full of hammering, onto the calm silver thing, clawing with ragged hands and spouting all-vowel gurgling rivers, my mouth a goblet of ash.

  And the Mirror gave way, into tumbling and pale, into watery possession, sleek of covering mercury, perfect wash of purifying silicate, hydrochloric Sea burning slicing pulling skin from bone, ramora nibbling vermin from a great grey arrow of shark-flesh, warm pain flowing clear, fallingfallingfalling.

  (—In what distant deeps or skies—)

  The rush and foam of that invisible Sea aural licking at starving earlobe, thunder a ceaseless rhythm of time irredeemable, ecstatic Seaweed strangling gleefully, leaping goldfish sparkling into waiting mouths, open icy aquamarine descent through cobalt and midnight, phosphorescent tumbling girlshape in (at last) the Void of sight-without-seeing, in the oceansmith, in the blue, blue forge

  (—On what wings dare he aspire—)

  benediction of liquid gliding half-intoxicate eternal coffin-wrappings of cerulean manuscripts, the Water Verses. Ear over heel, downdowndowndowndown. Or up. Up or down, I could not say, I could not say. Lime skins cover me like garden snails, suckling gently. Turning and sizzling in the deep, bubbling skin like fiftyfiftythousand cauldrons, jostle of newt-eyes and ox-horns.

  (—What dread hand and what dread feet—)

  My hand like a white starfish among them, bouncing among the morass, the soupy opiate snowbank enveloping. Something different, not the Road, but the Fall, breathtaking Descent, bauble-perfect and giggling, the Fall surmising the world, surmising the Maze, surmising vandalized I in its blue-black wash. Crushed stuttering onto a silver washboard, strong brown hands pounding into cleanliness, all of us slipping, falling, drowning, throats coated in blue, nothing but blue surrounding in this incubatory downstroke,

  (—What the hammer? What the chain—)

  filled with turquoise yolk-fluid swimming inside this cyanic egg, swallowing the Sea obediently, fish flopping in the draft of foam. Fast as I can, speeding through indigo waves crested with elephants starry pale, transcendental fedoras filled with meringue

  (—when the stars threw down their spears—)

  seeing nothing through blank eyes injected with oceanic dye, deep-ening, deepening. I am still I, arms drawn like a bow towards the sun.

  (—Dare frame, dare frame, dare frame thy, dare frame, dare clasp, dare frame—)

  Down, down, down.

  I fall and fall.

  11

  Give me the numbers of the moon, the rock-salt tranquility.

  I wake with hardness, the bumps and trickles of cobblestone under my ravaged back. It has rained, I can still smell the earthy thickness
of rinsed air. Still the Sea lies invisible, but it thumps loudly, much more loudly now in my breaking ears, a piano’s lower registers broken and crushed to ivory paste. Still the Walls rise up, these new manifesting in streaked bloodstone, carved skillfully, not a glimpse of decay anywhere, antiseptic and darkly beautiful, springing up from a Road of polished coral like sunburned titans, draped with wilted windflowers climbing into nothingness.

  Desolate circle of stone, with the Sea screaming somewhere unseen. There is a click and clatter behind me, behind me where the Mirror should be but is not, unsurprisingly, blank stone. Just a tunnel, after all that ecstatic ideation, just a passage from one sliver of the Labyrinth to another. How many times have I known it and given it voice but must remind my unlearning self: there is nothing but this.

  The clicking repeats, a purposeful morse code of tapping the coral Road and I turn to recognize it, now nearly accustomed to Others and their erstwhile Appearances, and so accompanying my turning with a great, burdened sigh.

  “Don’t you sigh at me, landlubber. I am very fierce,” announced an extraordinary Lobster waving a claw at me with imperious airs, a flamboyantly large crustacean snapping at the Sea air. “I sleep the sleep of manic frog-songs, reel in bright rings of my-and-your sulfurous selves, my claws click on lacquered women and sandpaper men, leave puckered scars on their pretty, pretty skins. I am a Meaningful Lobster.”

  His lithe shell was aquamarine and crowned by such deeply indigo claws rimmed in copper, drumming and clacking those fabulous non-opposables.

  “Sigh, ugly human? Divine madnesses stream from my vermillion feelers, but only to be boiled and broiled and served to your slobbering lips with garlic butter and parsnips, followed by the delicate dessert of my soul, caramelized and en flambé, garnished with raspberries. Eh?”

  “No—” I wanted to laugh at his indignation, his purpled face. But he blustered on.

  “Who are you to sigh? You don’t even know your name. You tumbled through a Mirror and blundered into my Courtyard. Very rude. You’re getting everything dirty.”

  CLACK! His claws snapped emphatically.

  I bent my head humbly to pacify the storming creature. “I am sorry, I meant no offense. Others are so often strange and terrible . . . ”

  He stood unmoving for some time, his stubborn brow coloring emerald with injured pride.

  “They certainly are,” he said pointedly.

  But with a courtly gesture of his claw, he acquiesced. “Very well, I shall not Scratch you to-day.” He clambered nearer to me, clattering on the slippery Road, little legs splaying out and correcting, until he sat next to me on a chalcedony bench. “I am the Rope-Cutter, the great Key-Maker, the Splitter of Bones and Eater of the Sea. In another life I was a Dragon, and I scorched the face of the world.” All this he laid out in a low, confidential music, by way of introduction.

  “I am the Walker and the Seeker-After.”

  “Seeker after what?”

  I had no answer, of course. “I am the Woman of the Maze. I am the Compass-Eater.” At this last his scaly eyebrows raised in impressed surprise.

  “Compasses are difficult to catch,” he nodded. “You are strangely colored, for a Seeker. I think you have undergone Assassination. Do you know the Way?”

  I looked at my hands, the lined manuscripts of my palms, unable to speak for the frustration of tears. The Lobster shrugged.

  “Neither do I,” he admitted. “The Labyrinth has a surfeit of Ways, and all the Ways are its own. I cannot choose. I stay close to the sound of the Sea. It is the best I can do. I am very fierce, I do not like Others. They Disturb me.” There was a long, pulsing, and pointed silence between us.

  “What sort of Keys do you make?” He was such a strange, sad, frenetic little animal, flashing storms on his shell. He brightened immediately.

  “I told you I am a Meaningful Lobster. All kinds. So few take an interest—it is an ancient and refined art, but makers are few in these degenerate days. Keys of baleen and Keys of dried mud, Keys of Door-meat, Keys of fishing-cages, Keys of rain, Keys of whitethorn bark. Keys of gold and silver and bronze and ivory, sodalite and beryl and amethyst and liquid rubies. Sardonyx and cat’s eye and hematite. Keys of wolf-tails and Keys of iron pyrite. Keys of gardenias and camellias and rosewood, of wine bottles and Wallbrick and Roadstone. Horse-hide and sweetgrass and priest’s collars, polenta and lizard claws and king’s crowns, chess pieces and cheese wheels. Keys to Castles and Treasure Chests and Queen’s Chambers and Cellar Doors, to Garden Gates and Serpent Cages, Witch’s Huts and Prisons, Stables and Wax Museums, Towers and Armories, Tollbooths and Secret Rooms. Keys to Rivers and Caverns, Keys to Wind and Body.”

  The Lobster was hopping from one row of chopstick feet to another with excitement. “Do you want a Key? Is that why you came? It has been so long since I have had an order.” My vision had filled with dancing Keys, all in a paper-doll chain, all promising Entrance, Passage, Motion.

  “Yes, yes, I want a Key! But I have nothing to give you in return.”

  He considered, cocking his cerulean head to one side. “I will take a lock of your hair. It still has some of the angelblack of your Assassination on it. I could make a good, strong Key.” I nodded assent almost at the same moment he reached up an enormous casual claw and clipped off a curl about six inches long. Tucking it away under his shell, in the same movement he produced a small Key made of a deep blue green shell. If it was possible, the Lobster blushed from feelers to tail, his body flushing a deep orange.

  “It is my best Key,” he whispered, “I made it from my own shell, my own claws. Under the seventh moon I soldered it with my blood.” I took it quietly, away into my pack, but as I tucked it out of sight, a great, indignant screech froze my hand.

  “Why does she get a Key? I ask and ask and get nothing but your wretched shell turned against me and she barges in and you give her one?” A mammoth Seagull pinwheeled before us, cawing and screaming in a frenzy. “She’s nothing but a girl. She doesn’t deserve to go forward, or back, or anywhere! You cannot give her one—give it to me, you vile . . . Crab!” The bird spat this last deadly insult like a wad of tobacco, quivering with wrath. The Lobster leapt up, flushing orange and snapping his claws.

  “I can give my Keys to whomever I wish, Sparrow! You go away! You are a rude beast and filthy—you eat rotted fish! I can smell it on you! I would never make a Key for your kind.”

  “But why would you grant this to me?” I asked, bewildered.

  The Lobster shrugged his jeweled shoulders. “I sleep the sleep of manic frog-songs. I pity you. You of all creatures know there is nothing here, not even Reasons Why. Yet you keep going. He thinks he knows all the Reasons. Take it before I change my mind.”

  I nodded and thanked him. He gestured towards the spiral Road. “That is all there ever was or will be. You have to go now, girlthing. Or the Gull might try to bite us. Isoganakereba narimasen. I have to hurry, so do you. And keep going. Downdowndown.”

  “No! It’s mine, you can’t have it! You’ll lose it or drop it down a well or some other wretched thing!” The Seagull wept and stormed overhead.

  I rose with ache in my thighs, amid aviary outrage, ignoring him.

  “You don’t even know what its for—you’ll never find the Lock. Even at the Uttermost End, you won’t know,” he warned, gnashing his beak. I turned my painted back to his protests.

  “You are a very odd Beast,” I smiled at the smaller and quieter of the two, who was still blushing furiously.

  Again, the jeweled shrug. “I am a Meaningful Lobster.”

  As I retreated from the bloodstone Courtyard, I caught my image in the receding Mirror of his shell, framed in the squealing of the frustrated Seagull.

  I had gone entirely blue, from heel to hair.

  12

  I look out of my skull at all this inky blue skin.

  Lakshmi-flesh blossom, dark-soled deva. All evidence of the Angel’s work—my Assassination—vanished into sapphires and
crow’s feathers. To my waist sea-colored hair rolls and slips, washing foamily up onto the shore of my now azure back, now period shoulders, now violet waist. Legs stalks of skies, cobalt lips, a seabed fulminating, birthing a bewildered undone on the canvas of my skin.

  But the eyes, the eyes. Still blank and empty as a well, now blue within blue within blue. Another shake and smash of noses and eyes and hairlines, another stained checkered floor of cleft palate knights and thalidomide bishops. Walls like craven rooks, bursting out of an acetylene Road. Another, and another, and another. Is this set of walking beats different because a little blue-green Key lies nestled like an infant sparrow? I do not know what it Opens, so it is as though it does not exist. It has no Purpose. Yet I know deep as Self can go that Purpose is the worst kind of trick. I am in the fish, Daughter of the Whale. My mouth tastes of old tea water, these old questions recurring, spinning like bicycle wheels over and over, that same Queen of Spades click clacking against the spokes, the same black wheel and silver rim.

  I thought I had worked this unto its uttermost end, had demarcated my world, river from stream from ocean from beam. I had encapsulated it, trapped it in my little coffins and lockets, figured it out. I did not exactly come here, and so there was no beginningtime, no entrance through some fantastic Gate. But it was a measurable moment ago that I was satisfied with the non-advent of nothing and its persistence, that eluding Doors had become easy enough, that I was metamorphosing into a kind of expert Labyrinth-Woman, I knew its tantrums and its dervishes. And now I tumble like a candle through the night, wax end over end. The Mirror changed me, took me in like a Door, but not a Door, a jeweled tunneling worm. But didn’t the Angel change me before that? I have lost the threads. Memory is masked here, and days dissolve into ripples and smears of movement almost as soon as they pass beyond the moonrise, and so I could not say if I have been eaten by a Mirror before, but I think not.