Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  That there were eight of them you might call providential, if you believe in that sort of thing-but I don’t imagine you do. What use is providence to a god? Of course, tradition demands seven only, seven brides for seven brothers, seven maids for seven monsters. But Kushinada, Kushinada, she was the false Pleiad, the Eighth, and her hair was so black. I am not ashamed—her sisters cried out for her in their cradles of snakemeat, the Eight-all-together ululated in our stony crèche, we all beat the earth with our bodies and ate up her name in her absence: Kushinada, Kushinada!

  Family wants family, and I have all these mouths to feed.

  Seven-eighths is no good; we want the whole set, perfect little dolls lined up in a row, and how pretty their birthday-obi gleam in the filtered algaelight this cave allows. She sits with her legs crossed on the mound of bones, sits like a student doing sums, and looks up at us, at the wallowing serpent, the slime and sere, the strange sister-shapes moving beneath the un-molt. We make this tableau each morning after breakfast, girl and creature, primate and reptile, evolution in miniature, titans terrible in contemplation of our splendor.

  Every evening after tea, she pulls a scale from my throat, great and clear as a shaving from the emerald at the heart of the world, and with delicate lips—pink, so pink!—she nibbles at it, cake-sweet and swarthy with the taste of trees, and swallows with relish. I do not know yet what she can make of me in that strange pale oven of her body—much, I suppose, depends on it, but I-and-we are patient; love makes us so. This is the school of snakes, and she is my best pupil yet.

  You recoil, but you can’t deny it’s compelling—this folkloric blueprint, handprint, angel in the snow, and oh, I certainly could not have made such a shape, not with these whips and flails, tongues and tails. You must have done it; any angel of mine would be an oceanic horror, waving its unspeakable heads at a punctured moon. This has arms, legs, an anatomy so simple and profound you cannot even recognize it as a single body: snake, cave, virgin.

  It is your prurient nature which makes such things into miasma, it is you who holds up a glass and views her and I, our stainless acts, through the darkly of your clutching, it is you who lie on the grassy floor, redolent with oil and full of someone else’s food, and tell the mustachioed man-god-father that you dream, you dream of the great eight-headed phallus looming over—is she smiling or screaming?—a schoolgirl in her best dress.

  You dream of the cave’s moss-veiled crevice, and the girl vanishing into it, and the snake vanishing into her, around and around and around, and you do not know why it reminds you of your mother.

  Look at your angel in the ice, arms fanned out like spying stares.

  It has your stink all over it.

  I

  HOKI

  Walking is unpleasant. The muscles of my calves bunch new and raw like fundoshi, and my toes are flattening with use.

  It is undignified.

  My throat forces me to stop and soothe it at filthy wells lined in algae as thick as under-robes, but the water only runs out of me again, oily, seeping up through my skin like ink through rice paper.

  I have had to piss several times; sour steam rises from the wet grass. The whole business is revolting.

  Prefectural monks rub their heads furiously when I pass—they have not heard of the dragon, certainly such a blight would not befall their villages, blessed as they are of the Kami (and if I were in my right state I would haul seven or so typhoons from my left pocket to splash away those smug, simpering smiles—oh how I miss my limbs of thrashing palm trees and splintering camphor!) but they are assuredly grieved that the poor family of Kushinada, whose hair even here they have heard was as dark as ink pooled in the belly of a crow, should be made to suffer so.

  Give me rice, brainless holy, and get back to your kneeling—the sun does love to see you scrape. As for me, my stomach will not shut up, and wants fish. It is not used to itself—ridiculous sack of meat which is always too empty for its own liking. I once had innards of pure light, intestines that served only to translate wind to sky. Where did the other body go when I fell from the floor of my sister’s house? Is it caught in the clouds, in the slats of her golden tatami, light tangled up in light? I want it back, I want my storm-tongue and my oceanic muscles, unfolding like wings, black on blue on silver—she cannot have it, she has no right to keep it from me and leave me with only this stinking, mewling flesh dripping its slime over the earth like sacraments—why cannot I wring my hands and be rid of it as I would any other putrid mire?

  The bitch always stole my things.

  Even pride of the eldest—who ever heard of a girl born first? But there it was—she came sliding out of Father’s eye like golden pus, and the pillar of the world was lit up with her, Mother-Below was lit up with her, the sky was lit—everything went up like a torch tossed into a barn, a barn perfectly contented to stay a barn and keep its straw unsinged. Only Father saw her for what she was: a silly girl preening in her shining hair, who would never amount to anything more than a paper lantern.

  Then came the moon, sick-silver, oozing from Father’s other eye like a wet and shell-less snail. There he was, our paternity weeping luminate, his face made into a gaping wound . . . my brother sloughing light from one fringe of lashes and my sister bursting from the other divine cornea . . .

  What a relief I must have been—the rush of cold water and darkness, the mere and the gloam, the wind drying stray drops of effluvia on his open mouth. Out of his nose I came, and from whence should I have come but the curved nostril, in my sharp air and exhalation—I came up from the crystalline lungs like a waft of smoke and curled from my Father with a grace sun and moon could not begin to imitate.

  Or I was sneezed out, snot and phlegm, a waste of leftover junk, a tickle in his nose that had to be expelled, but was never meant to be a child. After all, I am not made of light, like the others. The sky does not want me. What use am I? This is what my sister took pains to tell me every day of our youth among the jewel-islands, Shikoku and Ogi and Tsukusi, Iki and Awazi and great, bulbous Honshu, curved like the edge of a spoon. So my brother told me every evening before bed, with his white sneer gleaming.

  Only Mother-Below did not worship their light, did not pile up psalms at their feet like jointed toys. She knew I was the best of them, she knew I was beautiful, too. Mother-Below, Izanami-no-Kami, the Inviting Woman, who did not shame me for having the misfortune of being born from a hairy nostril.

  She is here, somewhere, between Izumo and Hiroshima, under the paddling feet of monks robed and roped, under the hills fat with loam, there is a crack, a crevice that leads to her. I am the only one who bothers, of course—sun and moon have better things to do than lay lilies on their mother’s grave, grander tracks to trace than the one that arcs ever downward into the wreckage of Mother-Below, into her belly that should have birthed us, into her arms that still hunger for us, even battened as she is into the dark. They don’t care—the sun tosses her red curls over one shoulder and promises to have one of her red-faced girls light incense next week; moon takes his snuff and asks if Father isn’t good enough for any loyal son.

  Only I love her.

  Only I glimpse tufts of her hair caught between the river and the stone. She needs me; she loves me; she hates Father as I do, and all who take the beautiful things of the world for themselves and leave the rest of us with dreck and jetsam and fallow fields.

  If we were brought, my sister and I, before Mother-Below, and Ama-Terasu smiling in all her summer-bought beauty, with hyacinth in her hair and white arms burning, Mother would choose me, I know it.

  I know it.

  And so it is not wrong, not really, to seek after that ineffable her while I hunt the dragon and the tea-scented haunch of Kushinada. Mother would not begrudge me a wife, and what man could take a wife without presenting her first to his mother? Filial piety demands no less, and in the end, how hard can it be to discover the signs of a serpent dragging girls through the dirt-drifts of dead cicadas, spurting b
lood as it goes?

  The sun on the rice-pools is like a disapproving eye, reflected over and over. The night is so warm, so warm, and it is pleasant, if only to think that the heat comes from her, from her furnace-ribs, rising and falling in the distance, and her breath stealing over the water like sleeve-hidden hands.

  FIRST HEAD

  I am the first body/daughter./

  The name my lower intestine whispers/the sound of the taste of myself on a tongue mine/not mine/is Kazuyo. I was born first of eight burdens under brittle stars/my throat emerged first of eight gullets from the mother-dark-and-wet when the sleeve-stars were high/and a roof of thatched cypress bark.

  It is quiet in the length. My cells are/its cells/are my cells/are its/cells are my cells/my cells my own/its/mine. Meat on /meat /I am translated, child into serpent/worm.

  When I was myself/when I was myself and did not hold a girl in me like a steel pin in my hip/and did not wear a coat of monster, I lived in a village, in a house, and the mats on my floor were neither thin nor fat. I was born in winter, in the dead days after the last snowfall but before the ice of the air shows any crack. I was a small infant, blue in the face and hung like a criminal from my mother’s womb by the noosed length of my own umbilicus. My mother said later that it looked like a shell-less snail lying over my tiny neck. And like a weed-stuffed garden pest, it was cut and thrown onto the refuse heap, its silver scrap reflecting the moon as though it too was pregnant, swollen with light it was meant to have delivered into my little navel.

  And so I was born without the light I ought to have owned, with a stomach curiously empty from the first moment I drew ragged, gap-ridden breath. The earth ate it, slowly, with teeth of grass and stone. In years hence a persimmon tree grew out of that heap of cast-offs, and we re-planted the little sapling—so carefully, as if it were a baby itself, in warm red soil. My sisters used to play in it, pelting each other with orange fruit whose meat smelled of spices we would never purchase to scent our skins.

  I remember that now, in the dark, grafted to smoke-flesh/hanging from me like a necklace I bought long ago and lost in a drawer/like that old dark wood—my sisters throwing sweet scraps of my birth-flesh at each other, staining their dresses with sugared oil/the heartwoods of my throats playing catch-me with their own pulpy wombs.

  When I was a girl I gutted the fish my father caught, and their intestines slithered over my fingers, over and under, like weaving silver—their eyes went into our soup, for which the we were modestly famous, and rest of the village came to our stall in the marketplace at festival time, to slurp up the murky broth with all those sightless eyes floating in it, eaten staring at eater/and it is always like that, you know, the thing which cannot help but be eaten ogles the thing which will eat it, and always, always, the moist eyes are beautiful, their dark centers salty and sour/but the fish eyes, the fish eyes were too soft for my taste, runny eggs dripping their iris-ichors on my tongue, the black soup that stank in our house all year/Yours, Kazuyo, were smoky and sere, persimmon-dusk, and they rolled over my tongue, so soft—do you remember that, how you saw me as I swallowed you, saw my uvula bobbing over your limbs as you fell into me?

  Hush, now. I have not gotten to that part yet. (And I/you/say this to the self/notself which is not myself/but is myself, my selves, my daughterbody and my snakebody all wound up together like yarn/the self embedded in green muscle wall/hush, self, hush, quiet, bones, blood says be still/the self of/cell-to-cell, I say this to the eater which is eaten which is eater again/and hungry.)

  The soup of eyes brought men to our threshold, men with chickens hanging limp like claw-stemmed bouquets in their hands, with rice balls like diamond rings. They came to get the eye-girls for their own, to fill up their bellies with salty-sour tear ducts on off-festival days as well, and we were lined up, eight in a row, only I even old enough to boast breasts. Our heads bent like black daffodils, nodding mutely at the earth. They looked at our teeth; they tested our jaws and our water-carrying muscles, the length and dexterity of our stirring fingers. And, as they will, a man indicated that I was sufficient to bear his children and clean his house and boil his broth for all the rest of my days. He was not ugly, nor old, and his eyes were very black. I thought, idly, what they would look like staring back at me from a bowl of soup/only ask, daughterflesh, and I will fetch them for you like a pair of buttons to shine your breast/hush, hush, I’ve told you. This is what virgins think about when their wombs are sold.

  It was midwinter, I think—in truth I cannot recall, but it seems to me from the vantage of these copper-blooded innards that the trees were bare and bone-rattled, that the sky was impassive and pale as a face. /It was midsummer, you silly girl, and I watched you walk out under the eaves from a bower of green, and the sun was beating my back with switches of yellow light. So much green, so many leaves, all my heads lolled out of the trees and you saw nothing but bobbing fruit.

  It doesn’t matter.

  I wanted you then, like a husband, in your clean white wimple. Only I didn’t know how to be a husband, it is not my natural state. All I have are these mouths, these mouths and these tongues and these coils, and they all cried out for you that hot, still day, and I thought you were very beautiful in your dress, and I wanted to eat you, but I wanted to love you, but I wanted to eat you, but I wanted to love you/but I wanted to/I wanted/I wanted to love you.

  The man who was neither old nor ugly took my hand and led me from the threshold of my house, and the sun was neither yellow nor grey, and I looked back over my shoulder at the persimmon tree, which was very tall by then, tall as a standing serpent, and if something moved in the branches I thought nothing of it, only that it was empty of fruit, that the bark of my afterbirth was barren as a rotted root. I wanted to/see something of myself in the wood, something of my umbilicus wavering in the grain, something silver and unnamable which was my own flesh grown sap-ridden and forked. But there was nothing there, and I left my mother’s house, and all my sisters, heads still bent like a tidy row of carrot-flowers, with nothing for a trousseau but the thick white linen of my headdress and the secret of the soup of eyes nestled next to my heart.

  It was on the beaten road south-winding from Izumo/it was near the temple/it was nowhere in particular but somewhere between these when I/when you/when the empty-we-I came reeding by. Do you remember, is it round in your mind like an orange fruit/it is round in my mind like a floating eye/I remember how your hair shone like a braised pig-stomach in the summer/it was winter/in the summer which was so still, and so warm.

  And you/I/said to me/you/as if you did not see the man who was neither old nor ugly at all/I do not want your soup of eyes. I do not want your womb hung up in a tree, to give me persimmon-babies every fall. Come with me/go into this/and I will show you the place where monster and marrow and maiden/and meat and bile and voices/pool. Come away from this man who is/neither old nor ugly/young nor beautiful, and I will love you better than he/I will love you better than he. Be my soup of eyes, be my festival morning, let me drink you down with due reverence, let me press your irises against the roof of my/my mouth until their sweetness bursts into salt, and all will be well/I will be well/and all will be well, /and you will be well, /and all manner of things will be/well, in the dark, well and one.

  I/I/do/I/I will/yes./yes.

  You swallow like a child, milk-desperate.

  II

  YASUGI

  Mother, Mother, I mourn.

  I claw at the clay, the red furrows reek in the earth like kanji, ideograms of grief, need-glyphs. Mother, let me in, move aside the stones for me, for your poor boy who loves you. Mother, I cannot find the way down, I cannot find my way under the mountain—open a canyon for me, a cave, a door. Where are you? Why do you not answer your son?

  If I kill a dragon for you, as heroes are wont to do, if I damp the soil with blood, will the stain become a gate, a hole, a passage into Mother, into the dreamed-of hell?

  I am the only one who mourns her. The rest hav
e all forgotten. And yet, and yet. Am I really her son? It is not an easy genealogy to parse—would she open the ground for me if I were not her son but a lover, a suitor, an ardent and earnest creature seeking only to lay his head on her knee? I walk in the woods like a wild innocent—could I not lure her out with this purity, worn on my breast like grass-plait?

  Yasugi is a knobbled field spackled with huts, and clouds roam over it like clapping mollusks. Mt. Hiba dresses itself up in blasted rock, red as rusted blood and pitted like a crone’s breast—it protrudes, it leaks a sickly milk of clinging snow. I am tired—I am hungry. The soles of my feet refuse to harden, but bleed openly, crack, gape pale and womanish on the grass. I have asked at sake-houses and bath-houses and fish-and-rice-houses after the passage of a snake, a monster of any sort, even a particularly tall or lumpish man. They know nothing, they see nothing. They are so slow, so dull I can hardly stand to smell their breath, their bandaged thumbs—if my descent-body disgusts me, theirs buckles my legs with retching. If I were my right self I would bring the waves up, blue and black, over this whole valley and scrub it clean of their crawling and crying. They nibble the suckers off of white and fleshy stalks of squid, and suggest I go further south, to the city. They know everything in the city.

  South, south, ever south.

  The sun slaps my back as if it loathed me specially—which, of course, it does. What sister misses an opportunity to annoy her brother when he is least eager to be annoyed? She knows nothing of Mother, she cares nothing for her, she drives me south to the city, the wretched city where there is no Mother, there is no Monster, there is nothing but fat men sweating in steam baths and dead, stupid statues draped in garlands of sweet-potato blossoms. They write precious little poems, delicate as eel-fat, and call themselves brothers of the sun, because it is a winning image, evocative enough to ply a pink-kneed girl behind their screens. But the sun is my sister, and rides my bones hour upon hour, and oh, how she burns, she burns. There are no eel-poems about us, only lightning, and wind, and red, red heat on a man’s brown back.