Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  I dreamed it was Mountain who passed all these canine winds into me. He put his slate-blue mouth to me and took a breath that serrated the edge of the world. I felt his caves erupt in me, his glaciers and his footholds. I dreamed it was River who held me still, gripped my forearms in his hands like otter’s paws.

  I dreamed that I cried out to Moon, but she had been eaten whole.

  The winds were in me and marauding, the teeth of Mountain nursing at my womb, and he filled me with migrating birds, he filled me with blade-wings that carved pictographs on the inside of my bones, where I could not read them. I dreamed that Mountain shook with pleasure as he emptied all his stones into me, the boulders and the pebbles and the granite flanks, and the sharpest wind which blows at his peak.

  When I was filled with stone until I was too heavy to whisper, and wind until I was a body of breath, I dreamed that Mountain and River tore me to pieces with their teeth. They put my throat and my breasts into the sky frothing with whitecap-stars, and my thighs into the glistening rice-fields. They put my arms into the sea that boiled with serpents, and my hands into the desert, palms downturned.

  And between them they ate my womb on silver plates, and called it perfection, called it their precious-sweet, their horn-of-plenty, their best work. They sugared it with marrow and lapped with agate tongues.

  I dreamed I was dead in them, I dreamed I was scattered over the rims of earth.

  And I dreamed that when he had swallowed his last, and I was a spot of blood on his beard, Mountain began to laugh.

  Seedlings Sprout

  The I-Ayako is satisfied with the progress of the beans. They have not broken the scrim of soil yet, but she can hear them wriggling beneath, like butterflies. She is worried about the turnips. Next year she will have courage enough to ask the dream-villager for some wheat to plant. She looks now to the crocuses peeking up their candle-tips. They will not keep her alive, but they are so sweet on her little pink tongue.

  The wind is still cold when it comes down from the Mountain after its prayers on the peak. She would like to say it is a kimono that she pulls around her thin body for warmth, but long ago it abandoned its pinks and yellows and seems now little more than a blank cloth flung upon her.

  My/her mouth aches like a shut box. I want so to speak, to moisten my lips and make my own wind-ablutions, add my verses to the Mountain’s long poem. I am afraid it is broken, its tumblers have shattered in the winter freeze.

  Thus one evening I went to sit at the foot of gnarled old Juniper near my pagoda and told him my story, which sprouted from my throat like a plum-tree. I do not know the juniper’s name, but he is a good listener, and the moon rustled his branches while I spoke in a cobwebbed voice.

  “When I was a girl and had a fine brocade obi and soft sandals, I lived in the dream-village. (I suppose it is possible that this is only a vision like the others, but I am here, and so I must have come from a Place, and one place-tale is as good as another.)

  I had seven brothers who were all very wise and brave and they protected the huts and the market and the temple. But then came terrible men with their bodies covered in leather and iron, who swung long swords against the wind which screamed as they bit into flesh. They killed everyone, even my poor mother with her hair like a spider’s best web, and they burned the temple to the ground.

  I hid under a wheelbarrow for three days, until they had gone and the dream-village smoked black. I was very afraid. I wandered among the ashes of the bodies and wept.

  Near dawn on the seventh day after the men had left, a Sparrow came to me with a fat red berry in her mouth. She ruffled her fine brown feathers at me and spoke: “Go and see Mountain,” she said, “he will be your village, your father and your mother and all your seven wise brothers.” Her fluted voice drifted off and, dropping the berry at my feet, took flight eastwards, towards the craggy toes of the sacred Mountain.

  And so I took what clothes I could, a leaky water-sack I could mend, and the fat red berry and I went up the Mountain, following the path of the Sparrow.

  It was evening again when I found her, perched atop my pagoda, picking at the ruined paint with her little gold beak. I waited for her to speak again, eager for bird-magic, but she did not. I held the berry out to her in my small white hand and she caught it deftly as she flew back to the village, leaving me to the tower and the Mountain.

  It was difficult for the first years, when I had no rice or tea, but Mountain provided for me cherries and plums and chestnuts, almond milk and cold green apples. After a time, people returned to the dream-village and children began to come to me and bring me little presents. Since I am a ghost, they wish to appease me.

  And so we sit together and watch the origami-clouds, our dream-village of Mountain, Tower, River, Juniper, and I.”

  Peach Blossoms Open

  They are suddenly here, floating on the trees like a cloak of butterflies, a blush creeping through their white petals. Suddenly the pagoda has beautiful handmaids which shower it with pale silks. There is warmth hushing through the sky. I lie under the trees with their flower-veils drooping low and I dream that in the afternoon I can see the eyes of a dream-husband in the blossoms.

  I lay dreaming on the long-haired grass, legs brown and smooth as a sand dune, arched at the knee at the same angle as the tip of the Mountain, as the line that divides the sun-stone from the moon-stone, the shadowed side from the light. My toes wound in the reeds, tiny emerald rings on the dream-darkened skin, set with the diamonds of milky toenails.

  See what in what regalia my dreams clothe me! Violets brush the small of my back with lithe, sugary movements. The scald of blue above me like a velvet gown, cut low on the horizon of my breast, clasped with clouds at the shoulders. See how it covers me in veils and layers of silk, rustling against my now-royal thighs with secretive grace, how it moves against me and strokes the skin. And the gnarled intricacy of these roots of a mountain ash for my Crown, jeweled in sap and leaves yellow as papyrus. What sovereignty my dreams supply! I am clothed in sky and bough, crowned in arboreal splendor. I laugh softly, let the wind imbibe my voice, the tonality melt into nothing like the wax of a candle-clock.

  Lying so I looked up into the wind-braided branches of the dream-tree, its skin brown as the paint-pigment, the pale green of leaves against profound cerulean, the pink shimmer of flowers glinting like voices. They gleamed in the molten light, bright as blood, bright as the Dog-Star in the deep-blue days of summer to come. And slowly I saw, in the interchange of colors, red, green, brown, blue, white, that two of the blossoms were not blossoms, that their shade was not rose but the familiar olive-gold of his eyes, the dream-husband, staring blankly down from the branch, become the season‘s first fruit, snagged on a splinter of rose-tinged wood. Heavy-lidded, still rimmed in the kohl I mixed with my own fingers in red clay pots until the tips became black as cat’s claws. I tenderly darkened his eyes that past dream-morning when he broke into pieces. I ran my fingertip over the fringe of eyelashes, letting my lips brush the iris as I move from eye to eye.

  And now I lie under those eyes, against a tree which may or may not be on Mountain‘s flank, on the banks of the reed-jeweled river. I watch dream-crocodiles warming their bellies in the sun, regarding their mates with a fond reptilian eye.

  I dreamed I had no trail to follow, that he left no blood-path. The dream-husband, the dream-brother, left me to scramble after him and clutch his body to me like a penance. I wandered, merely wandered, like a caravan-woman, my hair tied up into a crimson veil to keep the smoke-black length off my back. I did not speak, except to the hawks which flew at my shoulders, and they were silent.

  But I also dreamed that beside me ever walks she, the second, or perhaps third self who knows none of this. I wander in her like an echo.

  The Skylark Sings

  The sun pealed out a hundred bronze bells smattered blue by a bleeding sky.

  Standing in the sacred “I” of limbs caught to torso, of alone on a mossy stone w
ith the stars combing my hair. I have smelled the sizzle of my curls. I have clawed and screamed but no one would venture close enough, no one’s arm ever lengthened to cup this body like a grail, and the Mountain gobbled my voice like krill.

  They are pathetic, my solitude and my dreams, they are sodden and grotesque, dripping their shame on the summit path, the filigree branches, the gossiping reeds. The river roses tangled in a smear of obscene red as the dawn spilled like milk over the tops of austere trees.

  It is Water-Carrying day, when the Ayako-body walks down to the River and fills its shabby clay jars. The running stream asks me wordless riddles, the lark punctuates his versifications with small pipings. I kneel and my knees creak—I sadly recall a time when they did not. The newest sun of a thousand warms my back like a winter dress as I lean into the chortling brook.

  “Tell me a lesson about water, River,” I murmur, for River has always been my tutor, less stern than Mountain in his dreaming heights. And when River speaks, his voice is yellow and blue, the fringe on an emperor’s sedan chair, rustling imperceptible gold into the wind:

  When you put your white foot into me, I part for you. But when you drink, though it is cool and sweet, you part for me.

  “River,” I say, “tell me a lesson about earth.” And when River speaks, his voice is green and gray, the mist sloughing down into the valley.

  If you plant your meager bed, perhaps a bed-tree will grow, perhaps it will not. But in the ranks of beds and trees and planters, only Mountain abides.

  “River,” I whisper, so as not to disturb the harp-tongues of the lark-flock, “tell me a lesson about wind.” And when River speaks, his voice is white and rose, the air stirring new blossoms.

  When wind touches the water-birds, it turns them the thousand colors of snow. Yet it does not change you.

  “River,” and now I am almost asleep again, my lips scarcely move to make the words, “tell me a lesson about fire.” And when River speaks, his voice is tinged with red, its edges flushed and hot.

  Flame travels on strange feet. Its heart is never twice the same.

  And down by the dream-river, among jars of mottled clay, I sleep and write these lessons with the others on the tablet of my wax-flesh.

  Eaglehawks Metamorphose into Doves

  There is a dream-sister. She is all red, even her nipples that cut open the flesh of the sea. When the sun rises over our islands, which lie like a beaded necklace on the green waves, she drinks the light in a goblet of vines. When she sleeps, she sleeps in the curve of my waist, which is also red.

  I dream there is no loneliness, I dream that she drinks my sorrow up like the dawn. This is the fire-dream, and I know it, for my limbs burn. I recognize the necklace of orange wedges and crab’s eyes I wear, I recognize the bird-bright throat of my sister.

  It is the fire dream and I am going to die.

  I dream that it is River once more who holds me down with his turquoise hands, and my sister’s arms are full of stones. One by one she brings the black rocks down onto my body, my sky-skull, the fine bones of my flaming feet. My lava-blood spurts like semen from throttled skin, leaping out as if it hated me. She crushes me under her vitreous stones, under her talon-hands, under her grunts and screams like a skewered boar.

  I am not afraid. My bones grind to dust with joy, frenzy, the marrow liquefies ecstatically. In River’s strange-nailed grip I writhe and laugh, tiny flame-hiccups erupting from my bloodied lips. She rains down on me white-eyed quartz, basalt, feldspar, granite. She stuffs my mouth with dream-coal like an apple, and I can feel the seraphic pleasure of my teeth cracking. She is releasing me, and my flesh gobbles her stones as greedily as a child.

  The dust-stuff of my bones River gathers together and mashes with rice-paste and goat-fat; into this he pours plaster. He makes of me an island chain, rounded as beads of sweat bubbling to the surface of the froth-torn sea.

  And I rise out of my bones like steam—they are nothing but mute earth, now. I am a naked fire, with breasts of naphtha and sardonic knees, I am beyond what once was the red of flesh and the dream of the sister, the crab-iris of my pendant and the blue molars that River sunk into my neck so tenderly as the last rock rushed down and bit into my brain.

  In the dream I am free, I range out, flitting from place to place, faceless, formless and wild, painting my scalded heels with ocean. The jellyfish pout in the harbor like little mouths, translucent and pure, swallowing nothing. All paths are taken—I fan out over possibles like hair on lightless water; my matchstick-braids swing wide and encompass heartless mountain-architectures, skulls and steppe-altars, the shape of a crone scraping circles into the sand.

  I am a body of flame, without steel-jointed bones. The dream-sister released me and only the fire remains, the fire and the voice, my voice, that ever-owl-screeching voice, banshee-bright on a hundred infant hills that are the old body, that thump like a suffocating trout, tail to the starry south.

  The Swallows Return

  “Why do you not go up to the second floor of the pagoda?”

  I leapt up from the rush-bed of River, the hair of Ayako-I tangled up with twists of milky grass. A great Mountain Goat stood before me on hooves of pyrite, his shaggy wool twisted gray and white, snow and stone, colors of the roots of old things. His horns were monstrous, swept back from his mossy brows in pearl and jaundiced bone.

  “It is not so very far,” his voice ground, like a stone moving aside to reveal a cave. It was not surprising that he should speak—when you have built your solitude-temple as I have, many things speak which should not.

  “I cannot get to the top. My feet are weak and stupid, now. My knees are like paper boxes.” The Goat seemed to shrug in his tangled skin, his black eyes shifting shades from jet to coal to the roof of a smoking temple.

  “I did not say you ought to reach the top. But the second floor is not so great a feat. Why not unfold your knee-paper and climb? If there is a tower, there must be a climber, else why would the tower stand?” With this his hooves clattered on the stones and he was gone, up the side of the mountain where the wildflowers grow all dewy and bright.

  Ayako is refuge. I am profound within her. She is the simplest of dreams, perhaps my best one. She trembles and is hungry for fish and rice, she fears storms and has silent flesh which rustles like a robe. I am afraid for us, that if the I-that-is-Ayako ascends the red tower, I will become lost in our/her dream-women, and I will not be able to tell the dream of the lion-haunches from the dream of the belly-winds.

  But we had young turnips and mustard greens in our befuddled stomach that day, and these things make bravery.

  So I-in-her stood in the center of the pagoda, in the crosshatch of shadows and strewn stalks of sun-leeched grass, looking up through the ruined levels, rising and rising like angular suns. I found a foot hold in the wall, and a ledge to grip, and thus worked my way upwards. There had once been a fine painting on the pitted stone, I could still see shabby colors in the cracks—a bull’s head, a burning horse, a woman giving birth beside a river.

  I was a column of sweat by the time I pulled myself through the mildewed floorboards and into the second room.

  In a corner long ago conquered by fierce and noble spiders lay a leather wine-sack, an intricate moon finely wrought upon its surface, and it was filled with goat’s milk, which was sweet and warm.

  Thunder Lets Loose His Voice

  When you come to the sun-wall, you expect a Question. A Riddle. But because you do not know, cannot know, which on is peculiarly yours, all Questions are asked. Only when my scarlet-dripping mouth opens around the divine interrogative does one Question gain ascendancy. Before I speak, all the Questions that ever were lie under the possible quiver of my leonine tongue. And so, because any Question may be there, soft as a Eucharist, all Questions are there.

  Equally, all these Questions are answered. (This is the logic-dream, intersecting the dream of the lion-haunches at consecutive right angles.) Before you speak, all answers jumble
themselves behind your acoustic uvula, a traffic in conceivable responses, as though they fled from some dark monster for whom no answer exists. Before you speak, you could say anything, and so you have said everything.

  Further, before you ever came to my dust-bricks and the slow slide of my paintbrush-tail, all the Questions and Answers have been uttered, rejected, accepted, stuttered over, well-orated, and guessed at. You have been eaten, regurgitated, defecated, decomposed. I have been slain, flayed, skinned, vivisected and displayed on your mantle for generations. You have killed the king and married the queen, blinded yourself and died in obscurity. I have picked my teeth with your metatarsals and sunned my belly on the grass. It has all occurred.

  And yet, before any of them have occurred, it is possible that all have occurred, and so they all have. There is no reason for us ever to meet. We have already met. I am in your belly, you are in mine. We are a many-colored ouroboros, merrily chewing on each other’s scales. My riddles are answered. I am content.

  And yet you keep coming, to find in me the snarled yarns of a thousand and one imaginable universes of envowelation and verbiate gesture—words and words and words, a tower of possible vocabularies, a geography of lingual variation.

  It is possible that women are like this, too. That from a single source they dilate into all possible women, like a flame changing colors from the center outwards in wide bands: white, blue, yellow, orange. It is possible that all women are one woman, who has already lived, died, conflagrated and drowned.

  It is possible that men are also connected this way.

  Despite this, I love because it is my nature the dream-taste of all possible flesh on all possible tongues.