Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Do you like that, Oedipus? I am delivering a paper on the subject at a conference in Alexandria next month,” the dream-Sphinx mused, and Prince Oedipus picked his teeth with a sliver of bone. He is bored.

  In the Wasteland of Quantum Exhaustion, the woman-who-is-all-women would stand at a central point, one of her possible selves would be a commonality around which other possible selves would revolve. Of course, each of the women in then in and of herself a commonality, and thus there is no center per se to the system, only an infinitely expanding series of centers, which negates the idea of a center altogether. As we all know, a center cannot be within the system and govern it simultaneously.

  On the other hand, the wavelength of each potential self is determined by its distance from the fulcrum-crone. But if we understand any of an infinite series of women and ur-women to be fulcra, the wavelength of each self is also infinite, both infinitely short and infinitely long, infinitely red and infinitely blue. Instinctively, these selves seek each other out and merge, unable to comprehend the depravity of their conviction that a single woman can serve as a hinge around which they all turn. The resulting sea of constantly merging and disengaging selves resembles the primordial mitosis-swamp—the infinite female, treading water in a mass of pure, white light.

  “I don’t think you are listening to me,” the dream-Sphinx said crossly. “Have you solved the Riddle yet? I think I have given you plenty of time. What goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening? It isn’t even a very good Riddle. You should have heard the last one.”

  Suddenly, the Prince’s rather dull face lit up with revelation.

  “I do!” he cried, leaping to his feet, “I do! A man does, I mean.”

  And the Sphinx smiled.

  “Don’t congratulate yourself too much. It isn’t the Riddle after all, that you have conquered, but the Riddle that conquers you.”

  Oedipus did not even do her the honor of eating her, but rather stabbed her with his dagger and watched her die with the peculiar satisfaction of aristocracy. He left her corpse to the flies and the desert-birds. And her body was the color of the dream-sand, which even as she bled began to cover her in gold, and preserve her bones as relics.

  As she died, the dream-Sphinx uttered her last Riddle, which is, of necessity, unanswerable.

  Of course, Oedipus, your story is already told, too. The King is dead, the Queen is dead, your daughters and sons are dead, and you are blinded on the road to Colonus. This is as easy to read as an answer in the back of a mathematics textbook. It has already been a hundred times over, a thousand. There can be no free will in the Wasteland. We are all bound up together, belly to belly to belly.

  When one possible woman dies, it is as though a shutter closes, and the light from a certain window is snuffed out. There are many, many more windows, and really, since the window had already been opened and shut an infinite number of times, since in potential it occupies both the states of Open and Shut, nothing changes at all. Is this process indefinite?

  Water Begins to Freeze

  “I do not want to, Fox. Just tell me my lesson. They are mine, I do not like to see them written. They are my own, no one else’s.”

  “The more you possess, the wiser you become?” Fox asked, with an arch expression. I blushed.

  “I did not say I was wise.”

  “This is the way. Each by each, night falls and the rivers freeze over, the black branches gather ice, the seeds sleep in the earth and dream the peculiar dreams of rooted things. The cicadas stop singing, the crickets die. You are not separate from this. Stories end, riddles are answered. If there is no end, no story has been told. Though the answers to a single riddle are infinite, the number of correct answers is finite—there is but one. I am the answer to you. I am the second bead, that which completes your question.”

  Night had stolen up the side of the pagoda, twisted dark fingers into the vines, and now shone blackly across the floor.

  “Then the I-that-is-Ayako is the true thing. The others are false,” I concluded with sorrow.

  “In the end, silk-child, does it matter which is which?”

  “To me, it matters,” I pleaded.

  “When it does not, then you will be wise.” The Fox licked her paw and gestured towards me. “Turn the page,” she said softly.

  Earth Begins to Freeze

  There is an old circus trick: a girl lets a serpent swallow her whole. Beautiful people pay their pennies and see a woman become the apple of Eden, devoured by the grinning dragon, writhingly slick with olive oil so that when the tattered red curtains shut, her partner can haul her feet-first from those hinged jaws, a grotesque, hermaphroditic birth enacted every night at seven and nine o’clock sharp. This act requires both the serpent and the girl’s consent—neither can perform it without the other. The old serpent lets herself be abused by the lovely woman and the crowd, but in exchange, she enjoys the bliss of reliving the meal over and over again.

  In the audience, perhaps a mother will whisper to her child, “That was how the old stories say it was in the beginning of the world, when Tiamat, who was Queen of the Watery Abyss, was destroyed and the earth made from her flesh. She was swallowed by the serpent, too.”

  But I was not. I was the serpent and the girl. Mountain was the circus-master.

  Now it is quiet. I have covered Mountain. I have covered River. I have flooded the hallways of the Palace and erased the History of the World. The ink itself has dissolved in me until no creature can taste its sourness. I spat the castle from my mouth when the floods came.

  The salt-flood of my tears cleansed the world—the abyss is on the face of the earth now, and at last there is quiet. The waters rushed in and the dams broke with a sound like matchsticks snapping, the foam hushed over my belly and my hair floated on the waves like a silver-knotted net. There was a tumult of sea, the great salt waves erasing villages, temples, towns, capitals. It made everything clean, transcendent, pure. When the Moon rose up over the surface of the earth and saw the New Sea, she exulted in her diamond carriage and cried out with her voice of spun glass.

  I battered Mountain with waves and forced River to join his water to mine. Mountain is merely buried, his voice shut up in a blue casket—River is within me, and I relive the meal over and over, with delight. He twists in my belly with delicious fervor.

  There is flotsam everywhere, but that will pass. Seabirds call out desolate songs and search for aeries that have long been swallowed. They roost now on anything that is buoyant—cradles, spinning wheels, stable doors. That will pass, too. The world will be made again, no doubt. It is the way. The process is indefinite. It is made, it is dismantled, it is made again. Perhaps this time I will make it, and write my name in crushed jade.

  I am peaceful now, the peace of the full belly. I look out over the sea and watch my wounds heal themselves. Flesh knits itself to itself, slowly, slowly. I am still missing many teeth, but I have confidence that they will turn up. I can afford contentment, I have bought it dearly.

  Half of my body is still hung in the sky like a trophy. I lie on the earth-that-is-me and stare into the sky, which stares back. And we rock ourselves to sleep, we two, in this infinite mirror.

  Softly, Mountain rumbles beneath me.

  Pheasants Dive Into the Water Becoming Monster Clams

  In the dream of Ayako, she touches the book with tender hands and the Fox watches her. In the dream of Ayako she is washed in moonlight scented by the sea. It is becoming very cold, and Mountain has drawn over himself his old snow-cloak. In the dream of Ayako, her hands are terribly thin and have begun, in places, to shine blue and indigo.

  In the dream of Ayako, the thought has begun to form in her that none of the women are real, that even she is a shade, a vision. Perhaps the villagers are right to think her a vengeful ghost. Perhaps the village is not real, either. She had, of course, long suspected that the boys who brought her rice were dreams. This thought was like the grain of sa
nd that forces the oyster to make a pearl—it pained her, and yet the fist of her soul closed around it.

  Perhaps the dream at the base of her soul was true—the silent girl who did not move. But perhaps not. Ships existed that had no anchors, perhaps even that had no sails or oars. It was possible that she existed with nothing at her core but ether, nothing but a dark swirl of air.

  In the dream of Ayako, the Fox lies down beside her in the weak light, her red haunches glittering. She is very lovely, with her grand tail. Ayako thinks that the Fox must have found a great many succulent mice to keep her this fat in the swift-snowed winter.

  And because Ayako is lonely, she reads aloud, simply so that she may hear the voice of a human, whether or not she is real.

  The Rainbow Hides

  In the ninth month of pregnancy the fetus is nearly fully grown. It has gained a great deal of subcutaneous fat and can normally breathe outside the womb at this stage. The mother will experience anxiety and discomfort in the weeks prior to birth. The fetus sleeps for the majority of its tenancy in the womb, and experiences REM sleep, an indication of dreaming.

  I kneel in the deep water to give birth, to finish the course he decided for me. In a dream did I mount the golem-husband and take the child into my belly. In a dream did I swell like a bow drawing and feel the hawk-headed son stir in my womb, felt the hard press of his talons against my flesh. Feathers serrate the uterine walls, and the metallic beak kneads my flesh like meager bread. In a dream did I set the body into a sarcophagus of jasper and agate, and let it sail into the south on the great currents.

  And now I kneel in the silt, attended by crocodiles with their pupilless eyes, and my body drains out of itself—water and blood and pages of dedicated verse. I have lost the dream-husband, even his desiccated flesh is lost to me. I replace him with the dream-son and hope that I am not asked to sew his bones back together with the threads of my hair, as I have had to do with his father.

  I cry out to the desert and my voice is eaten by a dearth of wind. My belly cuts itself like a flayed fish; a bloody-eyed child crawls out and shakes amniotic fluid from his feathered hair. Sobbing, I reach for him over the ruin of my body, clutching my son with the moon between his brow, little Horus, who will make the world over again.

  I fall backwards into exhaustion, and my blood eddies out into the Nile. It is promptly devoured by a school of infant catfish, and the sun begins to rise in the west.

  Heaven’s Essence Rises Up and Earth’s Essence Sinks Down

  “This is the last woman,” the Fox said, and I knew it was true. I was not the last woman, of course. I was not the first. The I-that-is-Ayako is a hinge which opens and shuts strange windows, who dreams she is more than her flesh.

  “Words are redundancies, after all, my girl. Mountain abides. River changes. The cicada sings its time and is silent. All these things can be known without a single word. You have been glutted with words, but I have opened up a drain at the base of your heart and soon you will be empty as an amber shell. It is not altogether a sad thing.”

  I, and all the dreams of myself, looked in one body out the window of the pagoda, at the striated skin of Mountain, gray and quartz-white, as though he had been weeping. The blue-gold light of dawn crept up his flank, pressing his velvet nose into the stone. The sky had dropped its hazy veils over the valley, and to sit in the center of the morning was to sit zazen in the center of some vast pearl. The trees had all become bare again, and my garden was a patch of black soil, concealing the dreaming seeds.

  As I turned the last page of the book and began to read, Fox extended her rosy tongue until it nearly touched my face.

  And on it, like a jewel, was a single, perfect cicada shell.

  Walling Ourselves Up, It Becomes Winter

  The man who was killed they called the breaker of horses, and the one who killed him dragged his body behind a chariot around the walls of the city. The sweat of the brown horses ran thick and fast, and the fire-goddess drew back from the holy city, so stunned was she by the madness of two men. The charioteer had driven himself into a frenzy—his hair flew wildly as a ship’s loose sail, his teeth gnashed, his knuckles were white on the reins. Women tore their hair and begged him to stop, but even as the wheels splintered into wedges and two of the horses dropped dead of exhaustion, he would not cease.

  The city trembled at the sound of the careening hoof beats, and the fire-goddess bided her time.

  But I lay over the city and it rose to meet the movements of my crimson body—I only had to wait a little while. It crackled through my fingers and the mortar itself exploded into flame, the towers thrust up into me and fell back scorched to dust. I laughed and wept as my skin covered the walls and courtyards, the markets and temples. The wind whipped along the ramparts and the flames arched towards the pure white sky. The swords themselves melted to a bronze wine, running freely over the cobbled streets.

  I lay in the center of it, curled into myself like a yin-yang, pulsing with heat, smiling into my belly and reveling in the surrender of the city to my love. Soon it would be a smoking black ruin, a diorama of ash that had once been called sacred.

  But now was the best time, when I shot my flames into the windy towers and consumed the flesh of my body and the flesh of the divine city with one great, red mouth. This was my finest work, my masterpiece, the conflagration of cityflesh and horseflesh and manflesh. I could smell the hair of consecrated virgins sizzling, the paint bubbling on their altars, blood cooking into the walls. Over and over the city swore itself to me, gave itself over, abandoned its body into my arms. The tombs that ringed the citadel like a pretty necklace became pyres, and within the spiced smoke I suffered my scarlet paroxysms of luminosity.

  When it was over, and the city lay steaming black on its high bluff, when the sea thunders its funereal march, I watched the last timbers cave inward, the last sparks gutter in the dawn wind.

  I bent my roseate face and kissed gently the blessed ruin before turning away.

  The Copper Pheasant Ceases Its Call

  In the dream of Ayako, there is a pagoda-tower. It is empty. There is no wine-sack. There is no statue whose face has been erased by centuries. There is no Fox with kind eyes. There is no Book. There is no hint of what has or has not passed within it, only the jagged hole in the roof through which unimaginable stars have shone, and which now lets through the first shafts of winter light, falling like snow through the tower.

  There is an old woman, curled up like a child, on the floor of the uppermost level, whose rags flutter in the breeze. The sunlight makes her skin translucent, shows the blown glass of her bones and the delicate network of stilled veins.

  There is no breath, and her lips are the color of the frozen river parting to receive her steps.

  The Tiger Begins to Roam

  In the village, the boy whose lot it had been to bring the ghost her yearly offerings of rice and tea lay awake in his soft bed. He had dreamed that he was a prince, and a strange beast had asked him a riddle. Tomorrow, he would go and see the dream-interpreters.

  The boy studied the pattern of the roof-wood. He is quiet, so as not to disturb his father and sisters with his fanciful dreams, which, after all, mean nothing. His father always told him that dreams were the province of the poor and the mad.

  Outside his window, a squirrel left small footprints in the snow.

  Lichee Grass Withers

  In Kyoto, a scholar had fallen asleep in the midst of his scrolls, with his spectacles pushed up over his brows. In the cold morning, crows drew their wings close. Sleeping trees stood like soldiers at the gate.

  Through an open window, a handsome brown moth fluttered into the room, landed lightly on the smooth hair of the sleeping scholar. It paused, as if in thought, flapping his wings with deliberate grace. It seemed to consider something brought on the snow-scented wind.

  When the scholar’s brow furrowed, deep in dreams, the moth lifted away from him, and out into the gray dawn.

  Eart
hworms Twist Into Knots

  At the foot of the dream-pagoda, the great red torii gate bent low to the ground and cracked under the weight of snow. Her scarlet paint shone horribly bright against the pale earth, as though blood had been spilled. She lay there like a great heart burst open, and the sound of her falling broke the genteel silence for only a moment.

  The splintered posts which still stood straight later wounded slightly the foot of a late-migrating magpie.

  She would be buried under the ice until the spring, when the cicadas would come to mate in her shadow.

  The Elk’s Horn Breaks

  On Mountain’s east flank, a shaggy goat with massive horns chewed the tough winter grass. Snow caught in his fur in long matted strands. He balanced on the rocks, searching for the sweet moss he liked best in the winter months. It was difficult work, pebbles slipped into his hooves and down the cliffside, rattling like a shaman’s staff.

  As the clouds drifted over his back, he looked down towards the little valley, and thought briefly of the girl who could not climb her tower, how he pitied her, and how her hair smelled of cinnamon.

  Underground Springs Move

  River refused to think on it.

  Slabs of ice moved lazily down his current, grinding against each other as though they were carriages in the city. The fish dreamed and the trees bent low over the rippling stream, a thatched canopy.

  If it was true that she could not step in him twice, then she had not stepped in this River at all, he reasoned. Perhaps, then, he had never known her, and therefore should not weep.

  Wild Geese Return to Their Northern Home