Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  This is not the important thing, the passingthrough, the Devouring. My white-armed Death is not comprised of this sooty bullbody. There are many Detours. After all, something lies ever on the far side of any Door. And I could see it as soon as

  (it snapped at her, did the Door, and she fell in. Downdowndowndowndown—)

  we were inside, lying like a hearth and waiting. What lies inside a Door? What do you see in the sky? Only Another and Another and Another, a Door toleading within the Door fromleading. Doorswithindoors unto the end of the world, the disappointing climax of entrance, knowing that there is always one more, always another Wall, another step, another bridge across the doom of ages.

  The second Door glows red as from a forge, a dull and angry light illuminating the muscled walls like a manuscript. It beats inevitable like a deer-hide drum in the distance. Thuhthumpthuhthumpthuhthump. We might as well be patient. Thump.

  25

  Such a simple thing, opening a Door.

  And stepping through, such an accustomed sequence of muscles and fingerbowl-joints; habitual, thoughtless, even. As though from a lustral basin, I sprinkle sacred drops of the Minotaur’s spinal fluid on my brow as we exit his Doorbody. (Have I done this before? Am I doing it right?) Anointed one am I. Dark to light we move, from the museum-arches of black bone to a dusty cloud of subtle gold, as though the wind had swallowed the last possible ray of saffron sun from a dying sky and choked on its beams, coughing out a cigar-puff of topaz-kindling into the little room where we stood suddenly, having stepped through a dilapidated closet Door, draped in rags.

  The Monkey climbed cheerfully up my treebody and perched like a parrot on my shoulder, looping the long noose of his tail around my neck, a pretty tableau of gold against green. It took some time for our eyes to adjust, like waking up, peering and hazing. If I had had pupils they would have been struggling valiantly for just the right aperture to take in the little hut where we found ourselves safe.

  It was her scream that brought me into focus, instantly aware of the new Walls, knotted shelves sagging with thick-bound books, the forked red of the fire in her hearth, flames feasting on the crisp pages of still other volumes, inexplicably interdicted and condemned to the stake. Tall, slender jars like sentinel herons, bundles of dried branches and herbs hanging like a tangle of roots from the ceiling, scenting the room with an unpleasant odor of rotted wood and rosemary. Thick brown pelts covered the floor, and in the corner nearest the fire sat a woman curled into a rough-hewn oak chair far too large for her frail frame, dwarfed by the high warped back, feeding another book to the fire. All this I took in like a breath, lined with the ragged razor of her voice screaming high, tearing, hawk-like.

  The scream penetrated my body, coiling like an eel around the Compass within, spinning the needles, a twisting ribbon of tongue roiling through my ravaged flesh. Her so-human voice scored me like a whip, this realwoman, the first I had seen, without wings, without glass skin, just an old woman crumpled into her last chair, wrinkled and dog-eared, her house full of strange beasts.

  Of course, it was not the same for her. I was not human any longer, my lithe serpentbody green as grave-grass, long arms like birch saplings, lips like anemones. And my terrible eyes, almond-shaped emptiness, plain green stones set in my chameleon-face. How awful I must have seemed to her, how grotesque, with my smooth-furred macaque brushing his tail over my collarbone. I emerge Monstrous from the Monster, my skin the dragon-flesh of nightmares.

  And so she screamed. “Stay Away, Away! Don’t touch me!” She fox-howled and spat, shaking as though possessed. Her long white hair trembled like an avalanche, black eyes deep as river-rocks. I reached out a hand to calm her, and she scrambled backwards in her huge chair, screeching louder than before.

  “No! Don’t come near me, you can’t!” I recoiled from her, and whispered when I spoke. “I won’t hurt you, I promise. I’m not anything bad.”

  “No, no, girl, I am,” she hissed like the pop of a black book-spine on the fire. “Very bad, indeed. I’m sick, infected. If you touch me, you’ll be sick, too, and then what will you do, hmm? Don’t breathe near me, don’t touch anything, just leave before you swallow my infection like a frosted cake. This is a plague house. Didn’t you see the black curtains, the sign on the Door? Please go.” She seemed to shrink into her chair, nearly weeping. I was stunned, transfixed by her hate and fear like sour black bread crumbling on my tongue. The Monkey picked at a knot in his fur.

  “You’re fine. I would smell it if you were really ill. Hoo. Sick smells awful,” he said matter-of-factly. “No, no, I am Deathly Ill, I am Afflicted, I know it,” she cried quickly, her piccolo voice. The wretched woman was shaking as though her bones were rattlesnakes’ tails. Her breath came in great, tattered rasps, thin chest heaving. I walked across the small room and knelt beside the poor crone, leaning my emerald head on her knee, gazing up at her weathered face.

  “Please don’t,” she whimpered, “you’ll die, I swear.”

  “It’s alright, grandmother, it’s alright. I’m sick, too. Mad and Dying.” She flinched at the contact of my cheek and her bony knee.

  “Is that why you’re green?” The woman seemed interested by the possibility of a new disease.

  “I think so.” I answered softly. The fire crackled behind us as she considered us. “Well, if you’re dying anyway, I suppose it doesn’t matter,” she brightened, “But keep your pretty pet away, he’ll catch it for sure.” The Monkey hopped gracefully up onto the lid of one of the oblong jars and proceeded to groom himself contentedly.

  “I shall keep my distance if you like. But you’re not sick at all.” He paused in mid-comb. “Darlinggreen, she isn’t, I’m sure. But I can smell something else here, like mint in a rose garden—” He trailed off cryptically, smirking as he returned to his glossy pelt.

  The crone chose another fat book off her shelves and began to rip the pages into long strips, stuffing them into her mouth until her eyes watered and her cheeks bulged. Painfully, methodically, she chewed and chewed, until she could swallow the pulpy mass of parchment. Black ink stained her lips and fingers. When she had eaten all she could, she threw the book-carcass onto the fire and reached up to seize another.

  “What are you doing?” My serpentmouth hung open in confusion.

  “I’m dying. Why should they live? I’m hungry. Why should they be full? Now they are inside me, and I can store up words like a camel stores water. I shall never run out.” She patted her stomach, which was indeed swollen to motherly proportions. “Whereas you, my green-skinned dear, I think will be entirely spent before the end. Dry as a sand-beetle.” She chortled throatily and returned to her books.

  “Why do you think you are dying? You have lived a long time,” I asked sleepily, warmed by the fire.

  “I do not think, child. I know.” She ignored Ezekiel’s loud, derisive hoo and continued. “I have already killed a boy, already infected him and he is dead, moldering in the ground.”

  With this, the old woman began her story, told in a familiar sing-song rhythm, for she had told this tale to herself a thousand times before in her small dark hours, like a rosary. I reclined against her, my back to the rosy heat, listening to the vibrations of her reedy voice through the skin of her leg.

  26

  “I came of age during the plague years.

  Every night I would stand in front of my great carved mirror and raise my arm over my head, grip my shoulder lightly. I pressed oystershell fingernails into my skin, feeling for the embryonic lumps, the soon-to-be purple buboes I was certain were seething just beneath the vanilla smoothness, a smoothness waiting to play me false and erupt. I turned my head, feeling the night wind on my neck, blowing in through the frosted window. In those days the night sky seemed to me to be the great raised arm of some dark woman, her armpit and the first curve of her black breast, and the stars glowered, punctured lesions of plague ruining her perfect flesh, the great red autumn moon a blood-filled contusion.

 
I used to sit on the fountain-rim with a young boy in the Square, under the pale-cheeked fountain-statue of a beautiful selkie-woman with water flowing over her classical face, half born from her shimmering seal skin, her long hair like the very kelp-braided sea, her hands peeling the length of grey sheathing from her marble thighs. Her eyes stared blank and unblinking, (just like yours, my girl,) perfect eyebrows carved delicately. I sat on the rim of her fountain with a boy with orange-blossom eyes, a willowy creature without a name, and his skin smelled like a wheatfield strewn with the sweetness of fallen apples. He was blonde like the silken wheat and blonde like the yellow apples and blonde like the ocean sand. The boy had slender legs and a fine, aquiline nose, and all in all recalled a deer paused below a cypress tree, tensed in the moment just before bounding away.

  When no one was looking I would lift my thin blouse, exposing in a blush-inducing flash the light brown of my girlish nipple, and ask him with a quavering voice whether he saw anything. His dark eyes flickered over me, appraising. Sometimes he pushed his fingers into my flesh painfully, sometimes he would just glance and assure me I was not sick. But every time he would smile and softly say, just as your pet says:

  “You are fine. You will live forever.”

  I used to run away to a wide field full of long grass and dense hedgerows. Around my pale toes the soil was black and wet, sodden with March rain, rich and velvety, oozing under my heels, swelling beneath my arches. I was transported by the chocolate soil, its sinuous sheen. Crocuses pointed upwards all around like candles with young green leaves, unopened purples and whites. I would run far from the willow-framed square and its sorrowing fountain, far from myself, and pause there in the mud and silver-green grasses like Eve below the Tree.

  I ran to expel the scream that roiled and churned inside me, the cry that threatened to rip out of my larynx and tear my bones. In those days I was a scream embodied, saliva and tears pouring from my shaking mouth into the earth. I did not yet know the color of apples or Indian serpents, only the tightness of quavering pink lungs, uninfected lungs, plump and blushing organs clear of any blemish in their polished interior.

  Against a great gnarled oak tree, feeling the texture of its trunk like a second spine, I sat cross-legged in the late afternoons, roots extending down into rain-soaked deepnesses. Into the sky-mosaics of pearl and dove and dusky ash and cream-tipped waves of pussy willow softness I stared, tremulous with the fear that the color would never change, never shift or contort, searching for the black line of a bird to break the endless expanse, as though the breath of my soul depended on the shattering of the sky. I waited in my own incubatory warmth no less than the crocuses and dormant tulips, thick with the desire for change, restless beneath the unvaried veil of cloud, trying to move the long strands of cirrus-mist with the sheer kinetic force of my need.

  The boy sat beside me, clasping my small hand in his small hand. His face was half-lit by the clouds, gentleness of elephant skin light playing on his cheekbones, so high and noble, the arches of medieval buttresses. I remember him always in profile, a dark-browed angel, the glint of quartz deposits in his marble skin, gazing steadily at the horizon as though the line of his olive-eyed gaze could penetrate the secrets that lay along the linear flow of sky.

  I suppose I loved him, though he never asked me to search his body for lesions. I cannot even recall how many days we spent under the water-shadows of the fountain, in the grass-pillows of the field, though they seemed then and still seem innumerable. The coughing and retching of the world dissolved into the wind. But the examinations of flesh and sinew continued separate from the taut-skinned drums of pounding plague.

  The fear of a flat-palmed hand sounding a low note across my throat flowed on faithfully. It became a game, even after the hottest forked flames of sickness had blown over and what remained was merely the mass graves, the pits with long, mushroom-colored limbs stacked within like the rotting bricks of a misshapen pyramid, the tangled once-gold hair of women like handmaids meant to accompany some monstrous pharaoh into the silver sky and the storm. Hollowed cheeks like jackals echoed loudly in those ashen faces, covered in squares of bravely bright green grass.

  Later, when I learned geometry, every angle I measured with my clean plastic protractor seemed to be that of a bruised and broken elbow, the acute angles of riddled bones to haunt all the calculations I ever made.

  It was only a game, for him to probe my neck and my arms with tremulous seriousness, as though some latent epidemic lay under my skin, straining to burst the confines of my body. His eyes trickled over me with such earnestness, such tenderness, as though my wretched skin might break. In the rainy sickle-bladed stalks of grass we laughed as softly as the susurring leaves, wrapped ourselves in woolen lengths of silence, watched whisperingly the sky and the trees.

  We were young by the sea. The salt and kelp towers, foaming terraces, portcullis of coral and brine. Below the flowered balconies pounded the ineffable blue of the ocean, petals like rose-stained feathers drifting down onto its mirrored surface. The sea bore away the wind of the plague, carried it off into the soft cloud-drifts. The sea scoured us clean, made our skin perfect again. The stairs like a shower of peachstones down to the surf became polished and merry again, bright as brass banisters. The universe of our twinship, our two-ness, the low-population cosmos of our lives seemed slide back into the familiar leather gloves of health and flushed cheeks, of hair streaming in the flapping breeze and laughter like the songs of white pelicans.

  Of course I never caught the plague. If I had, perhaps the boy would have stayed with me, feeling that I needed his clinical expertise, his gentle fingers, his eyes boring holes into my uninfected skin. If I had begun to perish beautifully, with a trickle of sparkling ruby blood at the corner of my beestung child’s lips, perhaps he would have waited for me, knowing how I needed his clean fingernails and quiet voice, he would have stayed because he would have known how I loved him. He would have stayed and told me I would live forever even as the blood vessels burst in my rose-leaf eyes.

  When he died I tried not to think of his body being the color of mushrooms. I know, know now forever that I passed the terrible knives of plague into him, that every time he touched me he took the disease out of me and into himself, purifying me every time his fingers pushed into my muscles and bones, making me smooth and white and clean, taking all the purpled darknesses that never rose up like tiny volcanoes into his fawn-limbed body, dying of the sickness I never contracted.

  But I knew, secretly, that I was a carrier, and bore like infants the black strains of death within me, the only children I would ever have. That I would live forever by virtue of the demons I harbored, and bring affliction like a silent choking seafog to every boy that ever lived. Every boy I loved would cough up a glut of blood onto my white dress and apologize weakly before he collapsed into an ecstatic seizure of death. I knew always that I had killed him, killed him, killed him. I knew. I know.”

  27

  The woman’s face had become a jagged mountain.

  Salted tears coursed from every crack and niche, the secret erosion of her once-beauty and her bitter core.

  “I know what I am,” she wept, “myself and no other, tumors blooming in every pore.” I cannot imagine we were a comfort, my blank stare and the Monkey’s accusing indifference. Her tragedy had burrowed into her, and the crone before us was little more than a maze of empty worm-tunneling. I pitied her so, even through my own ant-farm form.

  “Still, you are healthy, old woman,” the Monkey mused calmly. “I can smell the warmth of baking apples in your skin. Why do you not simply give her what she wants so that we may leave you to rot in peace? I can smell it here. She will hunt it out. Hoo. Your story is your own. We cannot take it from you and we do not want it on our backs.” I looked up from her warm knee with a start, at the visage of yet another riddle from the mouth of a primate, another thing I could not understand.

  “What do you mean? What is it? What do I want?” He
ignored me and the crone chewed long book-strips, avoiding my eyes. He slipped from the jar and trotted over to me, fur rippling in the firelight.

  “Darlinggreen, I know you are angry with me because of the chess pieces, and because I am such a sealed box where you believe treasures and secrets are hidden away. But do not think that just because there is a friendly fire and a ceiling, because there are books here that we are not still within the Labyrinth. That a house is an escape.”

  At this, the woman cleared her moldering throat unfolded her limbs like creaky shutters and rose from her chair.

  “Would you like some tea, girl? I have some nice willowbark tea somewhere . . . ” She rummaged in her jars, profile caught by the palest of slanting lights entering a round window near the birchwood rafters with their garrison of black-beaked crows. She put the kettle on for tea in the half light of a hut filled suddenly with long shadows of the hearth and of dawn, filling the little tin vessel.

  I watched her drawing water, most domestic and ancient of tasks. Draw water from the well, and the moon from the sky. Corn from the earth and a child from the womb. (Wise woman, wise woman, do these things with your strong brown hands.) The hut-which-is-the-world is washed in blue kitchenlight, in the small, smaller, smallest morning. There are no possible others, just us beneath the kettle-steam spiraling towards the ceiling like the trajectory of a strangely-fletched arrow shot above the burnished pot, a little copper sun growing red on the stove. And the tea-leaves where she will divine the only face of her beloved endlessly repeated in the blue, blue light.