Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  The sunlight was thick and hot, pooling on the earth like coils of molten lead. It sat heavily on my eyelids and began its long work of darkening my skin. Off in the Mountain-cliffs, the first cicadas open their amber throats and start to sing, their scream of ecstasy wrapping the air in a soprano fist.

  Crickets Come Into the Walls

  I dream that I can smell his flesh in the cinnamon-breath of camphor trees. I dream it stops up my nostrils like the spices of the dead. I am mummified by him, each sliver I find takes its correspondent from me.

  It is his cheekbone, after all, still hanging with skin and blood like a curtain, drizzling fluid onto my skin. It reeks of river-waste, of rotting crocodile. And yet, I hold his face in my hands again, the high arc of his noble bone-structure, beauty being the mark of divinity.

  I dream that the smell of his divinity gags me.

  The rains are coming and then it will be harder. His slick-sided flesh will slip from my hands and into the mud-which-swallows. He is my dream-beast, the brother-husband vivisected, the body which was whole now in wet clumps, like hair from a woman’s brush. And the smell of it, embalming my body to drag it down with him into the satori of dismemberment. I am clay, and his fingers worm their bony lengths into the cracks of my joints, each part of him seeking its mate, but only its mate, having no care for the whole. His cheekbone calls out to mine, begging cartilage to rip from the wicked face.

  I am his food. He eats slowly, conserving strength until he can come together again and wrap himself up in river-reeds, in necklaces of ibis-talons, in beast-heads which can be changed to suit the latest fashions. Today it will be Hawk, tomorrow black-tongued Jackal. How beautiful he will be, when the dream is over and he is bodied. My name will be written down in the book of the dead in gold ink, curled vowels and tender penmanship. There will be an asterisk, which notes that I took his place.

  The Eaglehawk Studies and Learns

  The air is still. It cups me like an older sister’s arms and I become slow, languorous, heavy. Mountain has put on his best green, deep and savage, and there are birds circling his gnarled head. Soon, I think to my Ayako-self, the boy will come from the dream-village. Perhaps he will bring me a little chicken whose eggs I could eat. Or even some rice-wine in a clay bottle with a pretty yellow cork.

  I haven’t seen the moon in weeks. The constant heat-haze, as though from a well-rolled cigarette, prevents it. I am unconnected, removed from light, from the luminal braids that did not tumble down to the fennel and sage, basil and wild mint of an earth where I might have stood if I had not listened to Sparrow and been adopted by Mountain.

  Perhaps instead of the fulmination of selves in my heart, I would have made daughters with eyes like plum blossoms. Perhaps I would have had a son with clean fingernails. I would have owned five kimonos, each with a different flower-pattern along the hem. Cherry, lily, chrysanthemum, orchid, peony. There would have been bleating goats and a rooster, even, perhaps, a fine brown horse. There would have been a husband to share a bed, and I would never have built the master-work of my loneliness with such care, the care of a swordsmith or royal architect. I would have kept a little songbird, and learned to play the koto with graceful hands.

  The moon shines on the woman I never was, on the house I never owned, on her hair like moving water.

  Rotted Weeds Metamorphose into Fireflies

  I dream that this is the History of the World as River wrote it and Mountain spoke it:

  When in the height Heaven was not named, and the Earth beneath did not yet bear a name, all things were Dark and without Law. Into this came Mountain and his brother River, and they brought Light to the World. Mountain saw that a wicked and hideous woman held dominion over Earth, and she was the Mother of Chaos. Mountain saw her, and knew that she was evil, and resolved to deliver Earth from her grasp.

  And so in the fullness of Time, through great strength and cunning, it came to pass that Mountain, though her form disgusted him, let himself be seduced by her, for she was also a Harlot. And when he came to lay with her, Mountain contrived it so that River could enter her chamber and bind her at the arms. When the demoness could not move and cried out in her extremity, Mountain drove all the four winds through her belly. He severed her inward parts, he pierced her heart, he overcame her and cut off her life; he cast down her body and stood upon it. And the lord Mountain stood upon her hinder parts, and with his merciless club he smashed her skull.

  Mountain shouted his triumph, but the People did not hear, for they had lived in Terror.

  So that she could not return and do further evil, Mountain and River devised between them a clever plan. River cut through the channels of her blood, he split her up like a flat fish into two halves; one half of her they established as a covering for heaven; from the other half they fashioned the earth and all its districts. Mountain fixed a bolt; he stationed a watchman, and bade them not to let her Waters come forth. Only River would hold Water beneath his sway, and only Mountain hold Earth. They saw that their Work was Good, and Rested.

  This is how the World was made, and how the Men of the World were liberated from the dominion of Evil. So it has been Written, and let no one doubt its Truth.

  Dream-tears trickle down my cheeks, and pool on the wheat-bearing valleys below.

  The Earth is Muddy and the Air is Humid

  The rains have begun. It rained for five days and five nights, battering at my skin even through the slats of the pagoda-floors. Even on the third floor (which is not, after all, so difficult to reach) I cannot escape it, only lie curled around the faceless statue and murmur to it senselessly, words that are all vowels.

  And then nothing but the same white haze for days, as though the wind smoked opium, until the belly of heaven opens again and the fat droplets splash down and turn the earth to a sloshing storm of mud and torn branches. Poor Juniper looks bedraggled and his branches have lost their fine berries by the bushel.

  Wind conspires with water and I hide away from it. The green on Mountain’s flanks looks almost obscene under the footfalls of rain. It is has a glower to it, a strut. Even the cicadas are quiet, a wing-quivering audience for the sky.

  Once, when the I-Ayako was younger, we danced in it. Our toes pointed east and the great thick drops fell down onto skin which was perfect, cream-pale and smooth. those were the days when dreams stayed dreams, and did not encroach on the daylight like cities on the forest. Our/my hair spun around me in a long fan, my toes wriggled in the soft mud. Those were the days when I loved my lessons, and I laughed wide-mouthed at the pearl-silver sky:

  “Rain! Tell me a lesson about dancing!”

  Even the bamboo sways when the wind visits.

  In those days, the voice of the rain was young and sweet.

  The Great Rains Sweep Through

  I dream I range over the seas, above the hyphen of rain clouds. I see my dream-sister on the bone-islands, her hands in the chalky soil, trying to force her crops to grow. River tries to help her, he flows around her, through her sugar cane and orange trees, through her banana groves and her copses of dark-leaved mango. All of these have withered and turned black, and I can see her beat her red fists against the earth-that-was-me and weep terrible tears.

  She has set up a temple, fine and white, with a shaded veranda—heaps of hibiscus and palm fronds pile up the altar. There is a thickly sweet smell as they rot, trickling a sickly red juice onto the clean floor. She preaches there, and calls herself the fire-god who kindled the first flame when the world was dark. She tells River she never had a sister, that she was an only child, that mother and father loved her too much to have another. She demands that she is beautiful and that pigs be roasted in her honor.

  But still, her groves will not grow. My bones would not let such a thing occur, that my sister would eat the fruit of my body. Still, the dream-rot spoils everything she touches.

  It is no matter to me—better that she destroyed my flesh, that I am now naked of it and a flame alone. But I pity
her. She rages, scarlet hair flying behind her, clutching handfuls of the bone-soil and ripping her breaths in half. I care little; she is a mewling puppet stuttering in her temple, her aspect mawkish and dull. I am grateful for her stones, which made me the lover of cities, which took my flesh and left only the fire.

  I shrug garnet shoulders and move on. It is of no concern.

  The Cool Wind Arrives

  The sweat on my neck has dried. I eat mustard greens and the beans which by now are thick and lantern-green.

  There is a kind of contentment to be found in the dream-hermitage—it comes only when the solitude-temple is built and the hermit is interred there, but it does come.

  It is in the earthy tang of harvested vegetables.

  It is in the smell of the mildewed pagoda-floors.

  It is in the little bells of River singing by, and the heft of silence under Mountain, who carves his shape out of the void-that-is-sky.

  It is the ants milling redly home with prizes of berry and sap.

  It is pale petals stuck to the bottom of my left sandal, dew-damp and wrinkled.

  It is Moon touching River tenderly, her hand heavy with the memory of their lovemaking.

  It is the dark, earthy taste of persimmons and the fire-orange of their skin.

  It is the sound of herons washing downstream, the sound of their blue feathers rubbing together like cricket’s legs.

  It is the song of the plovers in the scented trees.

  It is the shade of the pagoda at noon, the shapes that its shape casts on the earth.

  It is the thick-dropped rain playing in the mud.

  It is in bare feet that tunnel in loose soil, and the hum of cicadas which is like monks repeating their syllable endlessly into the hot nights.

  But it is easily disturbed.

  White Dew Descends

  I dream that this time it is a girl. She comes to trade her water-jars in the great market, and indeed, they are skillfully shaped, with elegant spouts and handles that curve backwards like the necks of water-birds.

  It is all the same to me whether her hair is the color of a burned oak or of the fire that burned it. But like all my postulants, she is beautiful. She smells of alfalfa and licorice. I feel a question-bead slide down the strand, and its passing sounds a baritone note, deep and wide as a bell.

  “Monster,” she speaks first, which is unheard of, not done—“may I ask you a question first?”

  I dream that I consider it. Of course, it merely prolongs the ritual. But she is lovely, and it will not save her, so there is no harm. I nod my golden head, and the sand-choked curls of my mane tumble forward.

  “What walks on four legs in the morning, six in the afternoon, and none in the evening?”

  My dream-laughter fills the desert and I am sorry for a moment that I will have to devour her. I want to caress her cheek instead, and feed her from my own mouth, as if she were my cub.

  “Why, I do, child. For in infancy I walk on my four paws, in maturity I add my two wings to this, and in old age I creep on my belly and use none of these. That was a good riddle, girl. I shall remember it.”

  Disappointment rakes it fingers across her face. I can see that this was her plan, to win her entrance by becoming herself the monster, and reversing the natural order. But such plans are not to be. The face of the coin cannot be its reverse. I am to far beneath the earth to be troubled by such small movements.

  “And now for mine,” I intone, in my richest voice. The girl squares her feet as though she is to recite a verse, and shakes her hair like a broom tangled in cobwebs. “If n is a whole number greater than 2, prove for me that there are no whole numbers a, b, c such that an + bn = cn ?”

  I dream that my smile is fat and sated, knowing she cannot answer and that the sweet smell of her skin will soon be inside me.

  The girl’s eyes fill with prismatic tears. She understands. Any answer she might make would be a fantasy of foolishness. And instead of stuttering a guess, she simply walks to me, puts her tiny hand on my flank, moving her fingers in the thick fur with a thoughtful grace.

  The dream-girl lies down beneath me, willingly, and exposes her white throat to my mouth. Her tears slide off of her cheeks and onto the dry sand, onto the strands of her hair.

  I dream that I weep as I swallow her.

  The Evening Cricket Chirps

  Everywhere, on every high stalk of yarrow or fennel, on every low branch of camphor or juniper, even on the outcroppings of the dream-pagoda, the cicadas are leaving their shells.

  Each one is perfect, unbroken, clinging to the stalk it has chosen with total abandonment. They must know such rapture as they wriggle out, and the grass rubs their bellies while the whole sky sings.

  I think on what the Stone taught me as I watch them. I can never quite catch them at it, I only see the translucent shell cast off, with delicate mandibles and a diamond thorax. Some strange-eyed goddess has cast off her jewelry, and my meadow is full of sparking gems. The sun shines through them and they become little lanterns attending a nameless festival, swaying merrily from their stalks while the wind gossips with the flowers. They have sung themselves empty; the melody took their souls. The dream-shells remain, little urns empty of ash.

  There was a moment when I wanted to gather them up and burn them in a pyre, to honor their lives under the ground and wish them well in their mating. But I could not. It seemed wrong to touch them.

  They are familiar to me, as though each of these carapaces is a mirror rimmed in bronze, to show the lesson of the cicada’s dream: that I am deep in the earth and dreaming, and it is the seventeenth year.

  The Eaglehawk Sacrifices Birds

  River has seen my tears; I dream they anger him. He washes up roughly against my face to clean them from the skin which is still beautiful and green. His whitecaps like scalpels cut the salt from my ducts, trying to stop them up entirely. But he cannot do it.

  He calls on Mountain, who fashions blinders from his shale rock, and places them over my eyes. I cannot see to the side, only straight down the ridge of my nose to the half-built Palace. It is coming along, now, since they painted the History. Great crimson turrets rise up, exactly the shade of my lips—and in fact they have sliced away layers of lip to make a deep-colored pigment for the portcullis. I am being torn down to the bone, and it must come soon, if the conspiracy of my limbs is to come at all.

  This is the architecture of affliction, the cryptogram of the palace stairs whispers that no freedom is possible, no surcease can be salvaged from the flotsam of my quarried body. Boils erupt on skin that once did not bear up under the roots of houses. This is the dream of desecration, the dream of the palace building. This is the first body, which foaled all other bodies in an unimaginable stable. It can be seen as though it were tattooed on a woman’s stomach—the line of bodies, connected like a chain of paper dolls, from the one the Mountain harmed to the one the Mountain loves. A shock of limbs move between us, rimmed in light.

  In my own body which is not my own I palpitate and sweat great oak barrels of Chianti. I weep Retsina and bleed a late harvest Riesling. The drops well on my fingertips like rain—small lips fasten to me, drawing the vintage from my pores. I sit in a basket of lies like oranges and pears, building, too, the architectures of pain and vengeance.

  Heaven and Earth Turn Strict

  When I was a child and Ayako only, the village had a great number of silkworms, and the women wove with radiance. The fat little grubs ate such beautiful things in order to make silk in the ovens of their bodies—white mulberry, wild orange, watery lettuce. They were coddled like tiny emperors. Perhaps my gentleman-Moth was once a silkworm, for when the time came that they metamorphosed into moths and had mated, the worms were forgotten and shooed from the house as a nuisance.

  I can remember one autumn when they all became sick, for the mulberry crop was sour and fouled that year. They did not produce the pure white fluid that dried into the fine thread which then could be wound into a delic
ate rose-shade, even dyed indigo or emerald. From their translucent worm-bodies came only a thick black fiber, which was not even or pure, but knotted and bunched in places, so that it caused the poor things great pain to expel the viscous, wet silk. In my child-dreams I heard them screaming as their ashen bellies were torn out by masses of dark, coiled rope.

  It did not dry properly, and so the women burned it all in a great heap with the bodies of the silkworms which had died giving birth to the death-thread. When they caught flame the smell of flesh and cloth burning was like white cardamom crushed in a china pot.

  The ashes blew away with the next wind and the silkworm colony healed itself.

  Yet I have always wondered—what marvelous, secret things could have been woven from that wet, black thread, the thread that smelled so sweet burning?

  Rice Ripens

  I dream that I am kneeling on the riverbank, vomiting into the clear water. In one hand I hold his leg, severed at the knee, and tears have mixed with bile and silt-water to make a horrible stew.

  I can see on the kneecap a tiny white scar where he cut himself shaving, and I kissed the blood away. I remember the copper taste in my mouth, the taste of his inward self, his red blood swimming in me.

  And now I have a surfeit of his blood. I carry it in buckets and in water-jars balanced on my head. I carry it in wine-sacks and water-bladders, in thatched baskets and even in my cupped hands. I did not think a man could have so much blood, even him.

  I dream the brother-husband with his sundered body. I dream I see him in the moon which drives the sky before it like chariot-horses. I dream the corpse forming around me, the homunculus of his disparate parts, graying and moldered, and I have no thread to sew them.