Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  The First Lightning Flashes

  The milk was warm and thick, better than the throat-that-is-Ayako has had in many years. In the early days I used to pray to Mountain to send me a little goat I could love and who would keep me warm with her wool, whom I could milk. Perhaps I could even strain cheese from the milk. Instead he sent rabbits and squirrels to eat. But I did not complain.

  And strangely, with the sweet milk circling my teeth I was completely Ayako. I was within her tightly and hotly, blooded and fleshed. The dream-women fled and I was the white singularity at the center, open, iconic. Self flowed into self and all things flowed selfwards. The milk seeped through me in ornate patterns, a complicated knot work separating fractal-bright in my veins, which in themselves separated and separated further like winter branches thinning into twigs.

  I was truly alone for a moment, and the temple was whole, gilt-edged. Incense sighed from my pores. I forgot the lion-dream and the fire-dream. I forgot the dream-husband and the dream-sister.

  The phosphor-stars shone through a hole in the distant roof, and clouds drifted over the moon like mendicant’s rags. And under their house-blankets and mist-curtains I was Ayako, and no other.

  But soon the wine-sack was empty, and sleep brushed my ears with her ash-lips.

  The Empress Tree Flowers

  In my dream, I begin to plan a revenge. My breasts and my thighs conspire.

  Mountain cuts an alpine range through my torso, tumescent summits swell up horribly, boils of dirty snow. River is rewarded for his complicity, he flows now directly into the mouth of my womb. I am his banks, I am his delta, I am his floodplain. His fat throat giggles as he encourages himself into frothing rapids along my cattail-ovaries.

  But inside the dream of the belly-winds, the revenge-dream begins to form like a gilled fetus, in a satori of suspended animation, poised on a curious tiptoe like a Neolithic messenger-god. I am horribly open between them; they have polished my skin like banisters so that they can live inside me, playing checkers on my painfully elongated spine.

  Quietly, I start to gather clouds across the black line of my collarbone, to hide the star-areolae from their sweating glances, from Mountain and River, who hold my battered legs open. I take the stars away, I rob their treasure house of all those white jewels, I let them laugh and drink from me like tavern-thieves and all the while I am robbing them of all possible skies.

  I turn the dream-oceans dark, shade by shade. They deepen like a bruise: yellow, blue, indigo, black. I spit pigment into the waves, onto the new islands that have burst up in the west, onto the silent continents. I stain everything black. There are no harbors, there are no ports.

  But there are villages. River coughs, Mountain smokes his pipe, and between the saliva and the smoke I find thatched roofs in my knee-pits, marketplaces in my sternum. They sink wells in my tear-ducts. I suckle a generation of water-diviners.

  I hear them whispering, where a tributary winds up the cloud-side of Mountain. They are planning a Palace of my teeth. Molar-turrets, incisor-halls, portcullis of canines. When it is finished it will block my throat and I will never speak again. They send in canaries and cartographers to map the veins of usable enamel.

  But they work slowly. I have time.

  Moles Metamorphose into Quails

  A hawk sat that evening in the pink flush of sunset picking at grass seeds, not looking up or down, only at the seeds which will now never sprout. And possibly I, too, the Ayako-body and the fire-body and the wind-body and the lion-body and the wife-body, germinate together in some dread aviary stomach wall, fed only by blood and bile and the occasional field mouse, growing dark and strange, with limbs the color of pupils. In the mirror of gastronomy I do not recognize a woman, only flesh, only bone, only the swift-scarlet ventricles of quickening tongues. I see only multiplicities. My feet are rooted in this unimaginable belly, as are theirs. Toes disappear into fluid, into soft veins and pulsation, into rhythms inconceivable, irredeemable, and un-patterned. In the belly of the hawk I am silent, in her thick body I am still.

  I climbed down from the tower—down is always easier than up. When in doubt, head downward. By the time my joints have accomplished it, a weak moon has drifted out of the black like an afterthought. I made my small cooking fire on the familiar earth near the crumbling torii gate and boiled a thin stew of bamboo shoots and young potatoes.

  After a time, the Gate seemed to loom larger and I spoke to it, my second tutor, whose architect was ash, a body that had long ago burned out like a cigar.

  “Gate,” I said, “tell me a lesson about cooking-pots.” Gate did not turn towards me, but her voice was thick, paper-pulp fashioned into a mouth.

  They evolve like drawbridges, they open and shut.

  “Gate,” I mused, “tell me a lesson about tea-cups.” Her voice ran like paint, trickling down her red flanks.

  They are the nature of empty, there is nothing in them but that you put it there.

  “Gate,” I bowed this time, for Gate is much gentler than River, “tell me a lesson about chopsticks.” Her words stood still and vibrated.

  Enough of them together line a passage down to the belly-throat, where all things occur.

  “Gate,” I whispered, “tell me a lesson about hunting-knives.” Her voice fell on me like a shiver of pine needles.

  They are origin.

  Hot stew simmering contentedly in me, I curled against her once-beautiful wood and the constellation of the sea serpent coiled overhead.

  The First Rainbow Appears

  She is my dream-self, my night-self, she is my deep-self, she is my obverse, my androgyne-self despite her full lips and curving limbs, my hunter-self, my archer-self, my earth-self. The self-that-is-wife. She is the god-self that must rest within like a child when I eat beneath the Gate. She is embodied and unbodied, the Saturnine sliver of me that haunts the corners of my elbows, eyelids, and sits fecund in her smoke-lodge creating universes from pine needles. That swallows the world whole like a golden-bellied snake and excretes mythos like sweat from her crystal-scaled skin. The dream-body walks the desert on feet cut by thorns, with scratches on her palms and date-juice on her lips. She is made of earth. But within me walks the unscathed and unmarked, and she is made of light.

  I dream I have smashed clocks and pocket watches and sundials and bronze-orbed pendulums to feathered-glass razors, pulverized their round faces into metallic dust. I dream lilies grow from the inner curve of my skull. I dream I can see the muscles in my/her back slide and move beneath her foxglove skin as I moves beyond it, into the next self that dissolves into seafog when I strive to see the one after, to see myself in her body, sheathed in her hair, to unite with her, to be a whole. I walk in the brittle sun and she waltzes under the arctic blaze of the north star.

  I/she found your jaw today. It cast a shadow, delicate and wavering on the water, the shudder of a waxwing shaking rain from her feathers. The shadow eclipsed the water, and the water eclipsed the stones, stealing glimmer from the stream and silt. Deep in its fingers lay a row of perfect moon-teeth embedded in pink flesh and a ridge of perfect bone, torn and bloody as a trout in the jaws of a hawk.

  This is the dream of the sister-wife, and in it the silt-body becomes a narcotic, a morphine that encourages nothing but forward movement, denies the lateral progression of these beggared forms. She is sheer color, needle-wings of every irised shade. In her morphine river I drift like a raft of yellowed reeds.

  Floating Weeds Appear

  I have used the last of my tea. The dream-village boy brought it last summer folded into a square of yellow cloth, holding out the wrinkled green leaves to the Ayako-I with trembling hands. He was in awe, to see a living ghost, with her flesh looped over bones like knitted shawls, and hair that brushed the back of her heels like a kiss. His eyes were so wide, offering his tea as though I/we were a statue, a wood-woman covered in gold leaf, worthy only of terror and service. I imagine they draw straws for it, the honor, or shame, of bringing me these
small gifts.

  But I have used the last of it, and I must wait until summer to drink my tea again under the slow-blink of starlight. Perhaps it is just as well—my teacups, rough hewn from River’s fleshy clay, do not stand up quite right. Some of the tea is always lost, the sour green liquid sits at an awkward angle and sloughs out when my fingers brush the rim. My fingers, my dream of fingers, are not so graceful. I lose the tea, down my chin, out to glass, onto the earth. I cannot keep it all in my mouth. I am too small for it, and the cups too poorly made.

  The wine-sack, too, is gone. I woke, forcing the Ayako-eyelids open as early spring sunlight pried at me greedily, and it was gone. I think perhaps it is wrong for me to miss it. I think I should be content with what Mountain brings and ask for nothing else. Then again, perhaps it is not me.

  I warm water in my little pot and pretend I can taste the sharp star-points of tea in my throat. It is enough, but somehow, it is not.

  Doves Spread Their Wings

  I stand in my cloak of embers and stir the dream-earth, my skin-scald medieval and slant-eyed. Sage, peppermint, wormwood are scorched beneath me—I care nothing, nothing at all. Rain like inkwells pummel my sternum, my haunch. Away from the islands that River made, the ion-trail that is my flesh sears the sky.

  There is nothing here but the fire-dream, the savage flesh and the stern destroyer, nothing but death under the wide elms, the staunch oaks, death under my own eyes bleeding gold paint, my frescoed mouth, flooded with tempura and cobalt-poisoned blood, the lead of murder-pipes.

  I choke, I cough up a wreck of wood pulp and iodine, I drown in my own fluid-flame, in the churned death of volcanic paths, the whirling leaf-self which dervish-scours all in me that would lie well in beds of birch-bark, in beds like paper, where books like this one, which is not mine but hers—the dream-hermit, where books like hers are written in sweat, the manuscript of elongated muscles illuminated in diamond salivations.

  I am a vessel of salted meat, eyes glazed over by an abundance of nights, a surfeit of dream-visions wherein I touch human breath. There is a film over my dream-body, a veil which cannot be touched or torn. My heart beats seven times and stops, ventricles covered in thick gasoline. It is only in the stopped heart, the deadened pulse that I can discover any revelation, that any ease is to be unearthed.

  I am already blackening the soil, already devouring the root systems of baobabs and dandelions, already seething in my half-living skin. Stamp, stamp, stamp, beast rampant on a verdant field and I am nothing but a heraldic smear, blood on stained glass—the sun refracts through me onto the faces of the faithful and I am again only skin, only surface, only the fur and lip of a woman.

  Seize this chimeric body, this betraying flesh and it will always and only escape.

  I am a tooth, a body of teeth, and I pierce through as though the world were made of water. What else can I ever be but this black-eyed eater of men? What patchwork breasts can I offer up to the screaming stars that will ever satisfy their dark tongues? My back flares wide and strong under the sky, under the moon with horns like mine. Alone I corrode the earth, alone I carve shapes into the path. I walk uncloven, and open my woman’s mouth to swallow darkness until my jaws crack.

  I search for a city, I search for walls. I search for the dream of flammable materials.

  The Hoopoe Descends to the Mulberry

  The boy who brought tea had clean fingernails. That is how I knew he was a dream—what villager can keep his hands clean after working in the rice fields, at the butcher, the blacksmith, mending the well-rope, spreading pitch on the bottoms of fishing boats? So I spoke to him, since dreams are my peculiar surrogate family, I felt I had the right. That it was my duty to address the dream and call it by name, so that it would stay and join all my other dreams in their agate-toed walk. After all, I had no boy-dreams.

  He was very pretty, with unkempt hair and limpid eyes. His narrow hips seemed to jut a challenge, though I am long since the days when the hips of men pointed to me. He extended his offerings to me, trembling—he was the fear-dream, then, the dream of cold sweat. I liked watching his hand shake, as though I could curse his line with a glance and a muttered phrase. I liked the quiver of his brown skin.

  A sack of rice, a woolen blanket, and the beautiful-smelling tea leaves, which sat in their yellow cloth like oblong jewels. I could see the whites of his eyes, terror-moons lodged in his skull. I readied myself for the great effort of speaking with the throat-and-belly instead of the mind-and-heart. It is altogether a different skill.

  “Boy,” I said, and I was ashamed of my broken voice, creaking like a brass hinge, “tell me a lesson about the village.” I waited eagerly for the dream to speak. I loved my lessons, I was eager for more than River would give.

  But the boy only gurgled in his throat, an animal, horrified noise, and with a yelp threw down his bundle and ran back down the Mountain path. Behind him a dust-cloud rose up like an eyelid, and closed again.

  Ghosts are not supposed to speak. It is considered impolite. And now I must wait a full year to try and catch the villager-dream again.

  Sparrows Sing

  I flex my gold-shag paw under a drumskin-moon. It is easier here, in the lion-dream. All that there is on the Mountain is solitude, each of whose notes must be plucked on the harp-strings at just the right time so that the music of my disintegrating self will arc over this land like a temple ceiling, and with as many colors. That is not concerned with me, with asking and answering. In considering the whole, one possible woman is not enough. Only in groups, in clusters like cattle-stars, can they bee seen for what they are.

  I ought to remember the name-riddle. It is a good one. The boy who called me Truth still swims within, a seven-gabled fish. Between Questions there is not much to do but lie on the wall, devouring grape-pulp and mashed cardamom, resting the muscles in my back. I have a peculiar anatomy, being a winged quadruped, and the weight of wings on my thick-knobbled spine gives me pains. The city doctors will not come—and who can blame them? If I asked them which roots and roasted leaves would be a salve to me, their saliva would dry in their mouths. If they answered incorrectly I would be within my rights to swallow them whole. It is the nature of things: any Question I utter must be answered with blood—mine or theirs.

  This is the dream of science. In this feline body I am bound to examine myself, as though I were a butterfly skewered on a wax board. Maculinea arion. Save that I am also the slim silver pin and the thick wax and the hand that affixed these things. When I look at my flesh it looks back.

  This is the dream of separateness. I am not the city I guard. They fear my scythe-claws no less than my mausoleum-tongue. I am sub-urban. The hermit-dream lies with her boiling visions somewhere higher than her city, a superior altitude that forgives her this geography of the unreal. I am beneath and outside my city, I circumscribe it, I keep out the unworthy. We are on the outer edge, beyond the pierce-reach of copper compasses.

  Momentarily, I am the men I eat.

  But that passes.

  Earthworms Come Out

  I have become accustomed to the second floor of the dream-pagoda. A few centipedes, with bodies of jointed rubies, have made my acquaintance. The floorboards have fallen through in places. Dust and flecks of paint hang suspended in the air which is often gold these days, under a haze of low clouds that suggest the sun.

  Ayako moves more slowly now, as though she/I cannot connect to her body. I hope that when the dream of the villager comes again I will be able to catch him—I think another dream might cure the creaking of her bones. I hate the sound. The other women do not creak.

  Everything is full but this body—the rains have brought worms wriggling into the mud, and River’s fat pink fish are full of the worms I have dropped into their throats. The trees are made of flashing wings. My little garden teems with thick young shoots, pale green and dark, promising that I will not starve come winter. But the body is empty. I hardly live in it at all these days. The sun makes it lazy an
d I drift into the dream-women with diagonal ease.

  A gentlemanly brown Moth flits in and out of the pagoda. He wears his creams and fawns with the grace of a salaried courtier. He sits in the shadows and lets his antennae waft with the breeze. Often he will land on my hair or my sandals, (which require mending again) and his furry belly will rub imperceptibly against my skin.

  “Moth, tell me . . . ” I whisper in a voice like an autumn frog-song.

  “Yes?” he hisses, rubbing his paper crane-wings together.

  “Nothing.”

  Cucumbers Flourish

  This morning, before the dream-sun could report me, I swallowed one of their villages.

  I simply drew my knees together and it vanished, caught between my moss-bones and my vine-skin. I felt the roofs splinter and pop against me, the cattle scream and the temple bells shatter. My thighs exulted, trembling with a shivered joy. I tried to conceal my sighs of delight as they all crushed inwards and were finally silent.

  When my knees fell back, there was no trace. Mountain and River did not notice. They are busy with the Palace. They have called the ocean creatures together to fill a great jade vat of ink, in order to inscribe their names over the Gate, and the History of the World. River rests the vat on my belly while he blows smoke rings at the scaffolding which has by now obscured my jaw almost entirely.

  I am wasting. I begin to wonder if the villages would sustain me. If I only swallow a few at a time, perhaps they will not notice. They have set the red sun on my steps, and he is now my gold-chinned jailor, arcing over me, back and forth, dragging his great clunking cloud-chains behind him.

  There is much activity on my body, and they have poured the foundation of the Palace from a blood-mash of cartilage. The miners tap, tap, tap at my jaw through the night, piling up teeth like cairns, piling them up in wheelbarrows and crates, in baskets and slings. I have heard Mountain suggest seventeen balconies. River plans a tower from which to view the History, when it is finished.