Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  I hate her, Mother. Why could you not have sown me alone in Father’s flesh, like a persimmon tree growing without saplings in a prairie? The things I would tell you are not for her flaming ears.

  I hesitate to recall it; I do not wish it to have been. I came across a shrine yesterday—I suppose it is the fate of the Kami to be forever plagued with monks and shrines. They stamp the landscape like ant-farms here, lumpish tunnels arching over well-planted fields and bubbling through the shimmering squares of floating rice, worming through the world, digesting it and exuding it from their pasty bodies as if earth could be offal.

  But, like any ant-commune, they have great stores of food, and will occasionally part with crumble or wash when a man passes by and asks after their statuary. I did not mean to imply that theirs was in any way spectacular, but ants will be proud of their collected corn-cobs and strawberry stems. It is, however, a singularly uncanny sensation to look up at a statue of oneself, snarling and dancing and stomping, yes, I swear it, eight small snakes.

  My breath was lost, unsure which way to blow, frozen under my own face, and my skin seized as if run through with rain, for oh, oh, since Izumo I have often thought—worried, suspected—that I am walking through a story that has already occurred, and here, here are the relics of it, here are the stations of the holy, here are the oft-walked pilgrim trails that repeat a journey I made long ago but am still making, but have not yet made, and yet the ants—the ants! The ants, they seem to have catalogued my every step, and swathed the grass-impressions in bronze, and held festivals to mark my left foot falling in Yasugi. Little librarians, and their scrolls have already illuminated my killing of the serpent, the thin-spun beauty of Kushinada under its coils—all of this is in their greasy hands, and if they know this, if they know my family secrets, do they not also know the way down to Mother, and if I will find her, and the shade of her face in the dark? They must know, wretched things, it is their business to know, they do nothing but know—I am chronicled, chronicled, and soon I will not exist at all but in their scrolls and their mute clay statues—

  I wanted to talk to them about this, to close up with them behind geometric screens and ask them how the story goes from here, ask them if they think, perhaps, I was in the wrong when I went to my sister’s house, if what I did there was wrong by their ant-measure. Their little white-capped heads must belong to oracles, scryers, magicians, if they could have formed this terrible statue from raw dirt, tunneled it into being—I wanted to hold them by their throats against their moth-eaten reliquaries and cry: who am I in this body? How long will she punish me? Where is my mother? Where is the snake? How do you know these forbidden things, you stupid, mewling men?

  But in the incense-pregnant shadows of the interior rooms—lined with gold statues in that same eerie pose, foot raised over the squirming nest of heads—they only piled my hands with rice balls and salted plums, raw salmon and cups of soy-broth, smiling inanely, heads bobbing like lolling daffodils.

  “Who am I in this body?” I asked, having devoured four plums and a quantity of bland rice. The monks scratched their heads beneath white caps and looked at each other like a gaggle of birds at seed-time. They smiled pleasantly and spread their hands.

  “You are musuko, you are our son—all men are sons of the gods, all men are sons here, in the house of the gods, and beloved.”

  “That is not what I mean,” I answered gruffly, clutching my chopstick as if to break it.

  “What else could you have meant?” Their clean, white smiles did not falter. They did not know me, my blood chortled—rice-gobbling peasants know me by sight, but men trained to worship my kneecaps cannot recognize their god when he walks through their door. This is useless, said the blood, useless and comical, if it were not pathetic.

  “I think you do not know half so much as your statues,” I sighed.

  “Most likely,” they agreed heartily, “this temple is dedicated to Susanoo-no-Mikoto, Storm-God and Deathshead. It was he who came last from the nose of Izanagi in the beginning of the world, when the Great Father had finally rid himself of the foul dust which emanated from the body of the witch Izanami, who dared speak—”

  I would like to say I did not bellow like an ox in heat, that I did not lurch out of my cushion through the scented air and smear rice and salt-plum into the noses and down the throats of the monks, just to shut them up, to stop up their stinking breath, greased with lies, that I did not screech my mother’s holy name while I tore at their sun-colored robes, shredded their ridiculous hats, claw at their soggy skin, skin that already smelled of death, of putrefaction and again, again, of lies, that I did not rip the cat-gut that strung together their looping beads, and laugh when the pebbles clattered onto the floor like rain falling on copper rooftops.

  I would like to say these things.

  But under the gleaming, muscled knees of that awful statue of myself I bound them with what prayer-twine were left, back to back in a ring like soldiers in the grass, and panting, seething, sweating salt through these meat-pores I never asked to own, I began to read those fools, those orange-swathed ant-farming fools, I began to read to them their lessons under the tamarind trees throwing up their branches into the black-bustling sky like frenzied arms. Did they quail? I did not look, I did not care. No one listens to me, but these mouse-eared men would. If it is possible for a god to be filled with the evangelic, I boiled over, and they were the scalded stove, and they would hear, they would hear me, or I would open them up and spit scripture into their grinning throats.

  “Listen to me, listen to me when I tell you: this is how it was in the beginning of the world—”

  SECOND HEAD

  Men, even gods-in-men’s-skin, believe passion means (to adore, to lust, to be exalted through love.) They are foolish. Passion means to suffer. It means (to endure great sorrows.) Passion is the grasp of blister-ridden hands, breaking its thumbnails on the floor of heaven. (Passion is fear, like a peach tree planted in the navel, when your sister comes not wandering back over the cicada-emboldened hills.) It is hoarse, needling, the great iron vat in which flesh becomes oil. (It is eyes floating in murk, eyes crusted in salt like tears.) Its pelt is deep-shaded, like love—red and black, wine-dregs and sour mash—but it is (not) love. (But then, then you said it was, when you opened for me.) Passion cannot weep. The tracks of once-liquid sorrows run down its face, jaundiced and leprose-rose, a warm line of marrow-dust pooling on its collarbone like the burst bow of a violin. (Passion cannot weep, but oh, oh, it cries!) Passion hollows bones to flutes and seeds the flesh with baobabs, baobabs and women like baobabs, dark and deep in the muscle walls, growing like recalcitrant children, gnashing their agate teeth at intestines of twisted ivory. (I gnash, you gnash, we gnash at each other and eat each other and swallow and excrete each other and look at our passion, look how it gleams, look at the peachstones of our suffering in these caves!)

  I am the second body (daughter.)

  Quiet, quiet, second children do not speak. The neck behind the neck of the primary tongue is less than nothing, less than scale, less than true (less than true, less than firstborn, but I never understand you) myself (when you) we (are like this, old snake.)

  I pat my belly and you are within it, second daughter (second sister, second length of ropy emerald musculature) and your name is embossed on my innards like the brand on an iron kettle. There is one belly; there are eight heads (there are seven of us) soon, my (own, here in the dark) self in self (and have we yet learned to love the dark, to call it our mirror, to call it our flesh?) We are thrall to it, it serves us. And you are stoppered up in our body like a cork, and I am full of you all the moon long, and I too want to be called by my name, but your names, Kameko, your names crowd the (our) my mouth like krill.

  (Have I not called you) us (by your name) as we are?

  Call me Suffering, call me Fire, call me Gullet, call me, call me (what shall I call for, this city of dead girls and snake-guts, streets thrown over throat and thorax)
meat smoking in piles (yes, call you city of the dead, city of wraiths in wells, city of reptilian meat smoking in piles) second daughter, do not speak (second head, what shall I call you?)

  Call me Kameko (call me) you (by my own name) for that is the nature of the filled throat. I still have them (us) inside me, all who have ever been eaten, pushing at my phosphorescent ribcage, blue and brown and green eyes blinking in aortal seizures (but they are your eyes now, we who float in the bitter broth of you, and do you not love our eyes? You said you loved them) the serpent-heart forgets, it is strange-gilled and fickle (as if a girl’s heart is air-hungry and constant under every possible sun) but the Belly does not forget (it bakes us) itself (like seven round cakes, and when we are finished, oh, we all have black serpent’s eyes) the coils heave and flail in the same sacred dance, helplessly repeating their susurrations in the sand. Flesh bears a thousand marks, a thousand fingernails, a thousand teeth. Every time it is the same time, and the body recalls all its usual acts of passion, all the expected responses, secretly weeping (crying) for all those it loved once but can never devour again. To endure passion is to burn and bleed the black of all voids.

  (I was only a child; I didn’t know anything about devouring. You could have let me be.)

  A child, yes, only a child, but I suffered for you.

  (After my sister went into you, like a finger slipping into a ring, her husband, who was neither fat nor poor, returned to our house where the smell of frying eyes wafted from the pans so sweetly, and I saw his mouth water. He said that Kazuyo was gone, and he would not say, but he trembled, like a worm sighting a crow overhead. He demanded another girl to replace her—his loss would have to be answered, or he would call the magistrate and inform him that we had breached our contract. He was quite red in the face, and I thought, strangely, of the persimmons blowing into each other outside the house, flesh into flesh.)

  Men are foolish. But they are beautiful, (he was neither beautiful nor old) and they suffer so. They do not understand the nature of the Mouth, which is (to ingest, to carry within,) to draw the Beloved inside. I am the sacred Mouth, my body, my heads only hold it, like a many-colored reliquary, eight together in one, cradling the wide lips which open to encompass the conflagrations of all possible skies. Give me a wine I can bite, a human child I can drink.

  (Quiet, second head, do not speak. You have had these things, and they have had you.

  And he had me. I stepped between my mother and the soup bubbling away, and offered myself with head bent low, offered myself to this man whose face was neither pocked nor greasy, and he pinched my arm for the muscle there, and said he would take me, and a pair of black chickens to make up the difference between a first and second daughter, a first and second choice.

  But he insisted, you know. He was a good buyer, he knew how to tell if a horse is older than it seems by the hooves and the gums—he insisted on my virginity that very night, in case another serpent should befall his new wife, and he be left again having paid for nothing but a lump of blood and lymph left lying on the dry grass.

  He asked me if I was born when the persimmons were thick on the branch, like my sister. Holding my arms over my small breasts as though they could protect me, I answered—no, I was born under the plum trees, when they were dark and pink with flowers. My mother was carrying the well water up to the house—and here he took my belt away—and the bar was so heavy on her shoulders, like a yoke—and here he took my robe—and she stumbled—her belly was so thick with me, thick as an uncut melon.) Yes, it is like that, when I am full of you, of your voice and your plum-laden scent, and the well-water rolling in you—(She fell forward onto her taut belly—and here he opened my legs with hands neither calloused nor small—and her thighs were wet with the water of the well and the water of her child—and here he pushed inside me with a grunt like a boar nosing for mushrooms in the loam—and she did not weep at all, but squatted in the garden and pushed her baby out among the quince and the mustard weed. My toes tangled in the raspberries, and I have never walked quite right—and here he stiffened and rolled off of me, and his hair smelled of oil and eyes.

  “Soon you will carry my water, and give a child to my plums, and then you will be happy” he whispered, and fell asleep. He neither snored nor spoke in his dreams.)

  Happiness (enlightenment—father says happiness is suffering, and enlightenment is a soup with no eyes) can only be reached when you have eaten the world, when you hold it inside you like a content child, rocking slowly on the drift-currents of your blood. He thought you would be content when you held another creature in you—he thought you were a Monster, like me, but you were nothing yet but a girl with wet linens. Still, it never works, it is never enough. I cannot rest until the Mouth is sated, yet it can never be full.

  (He wore my maidenhead on his sleeve like a bright button, like a charm, to keep him safe when Kameko walked the road that Kazuyo walked. He called me his turtle-child, he called me his mare, and the sun was very high, like a pinprick in the air.)

  Men believe that Beauty will keep them safe. That nothing beautiful is to be feared. And this is how they come to me, innocent, pure as ethyl alcohol, unknowing and sweet, dragging Beauty behind them. Their faith in the order of Man and Monster is profound. They never expect me (us) to be beautiful, never expect the colors of my (our) flesh, never expect that Beauty calls to Beauty, never know how the sheen of your hair calls to me. (How the sheen of Kazuyo beaming from your long, swan-bright neck like a lantern lit only for me would propel me into your stunted, clawed arms.) And under the lights of my skin they gasp, their minds blown clear as glass, in rapture, in (passion.) They lust (for me, for the snake, for the thing we make together in the dark?) with a clean and singing strength—and lust, like passion, erases all but itself, imprints only its own image on the sweat-kissed eyelid, repeated like the refracted light of a star. Their stars become my eyes, boiling white and deep.

  His eyes were full of sons, and you were so beautiful, limping behind him.

  And when you were empty of all but the sight of me, (but the sight of my sister, laughing behind your eyes which had neither pupils nor irises), we began our too-brief courtship, under the high, wild cries of the migrating terns.

  (Like nested dolls we are, the snake and the maiden and the ninth daughter floating in me, gills like crystal, eyes without color, awash in the salt-soup of my) our (body, tiny as a needle, dreaming. It is not unlike a serpent, all Mouth and Belly, suckling at the womb-walls of this long throat, woman choked with woman choked with woman, and I) if there is an I (un-maidened and un-mothered, and where are the plum-trees who would hear my daughter’s first cry?)

  It is all one flesh, that monstrous swell, curve of globe beneath the Skin, heaving and tossing with an ecstasy that has taste and smell—quince and mustard and rotted persimmons.

  III

  ONOGORO

  This is how it was in the beginning of the world: a churning sea, and no earth, and a great bridge hung in the world: a churning sea, and jellyfish macerating themselves into starry foam on the wave-tips. In the beginning of the beginning of the beginning, of the tips of the beginning of the waves. This is how it was pillared in black, and it was so black, and its suspensors were strung with light like mala beads, and jellyfish crushed themselves into raw foam on the tips of the world. A bridge hung on the tips of the waves. This is how the bridge was pillared in the beginning of the world: on clouds, and mist, and the depthless sea.

  It was all confused, then, the air and the saltsea, and the darkness.

  In nothing, some part of nothing seemed to flow into a space that was her and a space that was him, and his eyes on the undulate sea were as the hand of her flesh on the glittering suspensors, at once through the void, the void seemed to flow into her, and in the briefest beginning of the beginning of moments, the shadows were perfumed.

  Izanami and Izanagi opened their eyes on the bridge that spanned heaven, and the feet of Izanami on the floor of the jeweled bri
dge were strong and pale. Her hair was as black as the nothing, and the void seemed still to cling to her, into her and out of her and into her and out of her. The eyes of Izanagi, in the days before flame, were the brightest objects of all objects in the span of space. The dusk sat on his shoulder blades like clothes, and he said nothing, and she said nothing, and they were the first of all things in the world.

  Steam rose from their shadows.

  Together, they pulled one of the suspensors down from its anchor, and the sound of it was like a harp breaking, and the lights were upset, red and gold and green, but in the hands of Izanami, who rolled the strand like a stalk of fennel against her thigh, it became the Amenonuhoko, the jeweled spear of heaven, and it was the third object of all possible objects.

  Together, neither one before the other, they plunged the spear into the churning sea, where there was no earth, and the spray wet the underside of the bridge, and their faces crusted with the salt of it, and the light-grime of the bridge, and altogether salt and spray and grime were tasted for the first time, on the first tongues. Under the light-clotted spear a thing became bulbous and green, and, after a time, it became an island, rich of dirt and loam, and there were dead jellyfish scattered on its shores like shipwrecks, for they threw themselves against the hard earth as they had thrown themselves against the sea, and discovered first of all creatures that land and sea are not the same. On this island was an empty house, an empty house with a great pillar in its center, and shadows were on the long grass, the long grass and the jellyfish like a smear of diamonds. And this was the place called Onogoro, and it was morning there. Stepping down from the creaking, starry bridge, Izanami and Izanagi’s feet squelched in the first mud of the world, and the smell of it was so new, like skin.