Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  As they walked up the beach-head into the house, the jellyfish kept up their suicides, for the lesson of land and sea is a difficult one to learn when there has never before been any land, nor any sea, nor any jellyfish at all.

  When they entered the great house, they saw that the floor was many-tiled and green as turtles would be once turtles were conceived, and on the wall, which was blue and black as the bridge had been, was written:

  The Room of Eight Footsteps.

  The letters were scarlet and gold, and Izanami wondered at them with eyes raw as peeled apples, while Izanagi was concerned with the pillar rising up out of the tiles like the trunk of a tree—save that Izanagi did not yet know what a tree was, so the word hung in his mind like a uvula of amber. He gestured to her, and she pulled herself away from the ember-lettering.

  They touched the pillar side by side, neither before the other. It was smooth, dry, cool—and yet all these words crowded in a parade through their hearts, for smooth and dry and cool had never before been, and their scent was searing.

  Izanami and Izanagi walked around the world-anchoring circumference of the pillar, in opposite directions, like planets orbiting some stony sun. When they met, Izanami, whose hair blew back and brushed the floor like reeds scouring it in summer, spoke first of all the things that ever spoke, and her words were the first sounds, save for the terrible, soft rasp of jellyfish on the sand.

  “Oh,” she cried softly, “what a beauty you are.”

  Izanagi frowned, and the corners of his mouth were like books burning. His brow furrowed and he looked through her, as though she were part of the wet detritus of crystalline flesh down below the bluffs.

  “You should not have spoken, first of all the things that ever spoke. It is not right that a woman’s voice should echo in the void before a man’s. I should have been the one to open the silence; it should have been I.”

  “I am sorry,” Izanami whispered, perplexed, and looked down at her feet, still grimed with the light of the Heaven-Spanning Bridge.

  “No matter,” said Izanagi through teeth clenched first of all clenching things, and with the flail and clutch of a newborn, fell onto Izanami in the shadow of the pillar. She tried to open for him, gracefully, but in his eagerness he crushed her foam-cooled thighs together, his knee awkwardly thrust into her muscle, and livid bruises bloomed there like chrysanthemums. His breath was on her neck as she tried to smile placidly beneath him, tried to keep any further words, any further cry, pressed under her tongue. Her body was caught into a pillar, calf to calf, arm to waist, and the pillar was bounded on all sides by the shuddering body of Izanagi, who quivered in the darkness, and could not find the way into her.

  On the green-tiled floor Izanagi stiffened, and first of all spilt things, his seed pooled onto the tortoise-floor, useless and pale.

  Outside, the soft slush of the jellyfish went on. He would not look at her.

  Izanami pushed her long hair from her eyes and smiled sweetly, said things which in the long days of the world would become usual, but Izanagi would not be comforted, and his brow deepened into its furrow, and his eyes were haughty as they looked on the only woman on the shores of the churning sea, and it was cold in the perpetual morning of Onogoro.

  THIRD HEAD

  I am the third body—daughter—Kiyomi-of-the-dogwood-smiling—Kiyomi who was never good for anything. Kiyomi who could not make the soup. Kiyomi who could not stitch her own sleeves—Kiyomi who tasted like mulberries and snail-shells, Kiyomi who dog-snarls—Kiyomi who disappointed her mother, who shamed her house—Kiyomi who lies curled in my heart like a slippery eel, suckling at the walls of my blue-green ventricles.

  —Festival days are hot, even in winter. Bound up, tied in, veiled and flowered: ritual clothes itch, and in my life my obi has never lain straight—I watched, and the Mouth salivated, even from behind its shield-wall of hills. All those girls lined up stiff as poles—and we stand all in a row, looking down, offering the loveliest side of the bowl to the men who come for the soup of eye and hymen, the soup of plenty, borne by virgins—I suppose then I might have been able to stop, to seek out other girls who were not of a height and thickness, who did not link hands like a chain of perfect ducklings in the water, who did not look into each other’s eyes with a silence like a child they had conceived together, without even the glance of a man to seed their single black, invisible womb—but even in that row of bent heads like bobbing bluebells, I was a blight on the delicate flowers of the dresses, in the flavor of the soup—but seeing the rest of them like that, six little maids all in a line, as though waiting for the door of myself to open and let them in, I could not turn away from them—I alone of my sisters was no virgin, and my mother said the house stank of my sex—six sisters with their suckling silence between them, and something in the turn of their mouths told me that they would want the jaw and the tooth.

  —Mother said I had to serve, even though I could make nothing but sludge of the delicate, fishy broth, and had sat by while my sisters learned stew-craft, sat by and pinched my lips to bring the red up. And he touched my finger as I passed him the soup-bowl, a breach of etiquette severe enough for banning, if I had cried out, but I was always bad, always, and I said nothing, did not even blush—I only saw the cut on my belly after the turtle-girl pulled me over her body like a shell—he saw what it was in me which would not turn away from bare flesh, the knotted leech in my stomach which slept, slept until that finger brushed my finger—after Kameko. It was still thin then, but it throbbed when Kiyomi was near—slept and did not know it meant to suckle blood-bright and gasping at any teat it was offered—in my nest behind the mountains, it throbbed when Kiyomi was near—and so when the moon peeked out he took me behind the shacks under the white and stinking dogwoods, such beautiful cloud-blossoms, but their scent like wet fur and saliva—I dragged my belly after the third girl, with the second girl still writhing—and he picked me up like a bundle of rags, my back against the rasping tree trunk, my legs hiked up round his waist, bruised by his bony hips—dragged my sliver-belly over the grass—and I whispered:

  “Did you know I was born under these trees? The smell made mother sick, the smell put its thumbs in her nose as she pushed me out—and the cut throbbed its three syllables: Ki-Yo-Mi—and the green pollen dusted my fists, dusted my tongue, dusted my hair still clotted with blood—it was still thin then, and it stung when I saw the third girl, the grass, and the red.

  “Kiyomi,” he gasped, “be quiet. I don’t care about the dogwoods.”

  And he pulled from me amid a shower of green pollen—the Mouth once it finds a delicacy, demands more of the same, and I could smell the pollen on you, quiet Kiyomi, the pollen on your mouth, between your legs—he came again in the morning to ask for my hand and I laughed, I laughed like goats bleating, and I would have nothing of him, for I already knew the sound of his gasps, and that he did not care about the dogwoods. Mother said I was a demon-child, fit only for demons, and would not let me near the soup again—fit for demons, yes, for demons, for serpents and worms—she closed me into the rear room and laid me out on the bedroll. I was not afraid, for this was mother, mother, and mother would not harm me, but she held a bowl of foul smelling paste—green pollen, and sap, and intestines from the little garden snakes—and with a mouth like cut paper she opened my legs and smeared it into me, whispering that I was a whore, a whore and I would learn to be a good girl, for she did not raise whores in her house—even later I could smell the little dead snakes, their little dead venom-sacs, I could smell their musk like family—and oh, it burned me, oh, it scalded the mouth of my womb, still wet with the festival-man, it bubbled within me and mother waited, blowing on the sickly stuff until it dried, and I tried not to cry, I tried not to cry but the tears spilled down, and the bed-roll was wet with salt and paste and I said nothing to her but could not look in her eyes as she held my legs open—you were still marked with your passion when you came to me, his fingerprints and hers—until the smear had
done its work, and I felt nothing at all there but the echo of the burning, as if I had once, long ago, born a child made all of fire—

  In the well of my—our—throat I—we—too still taste—feel—it.

  —When the man who was neither joyful nor sorrowing came back from the road to his village, came back with no Kameko, no Kazuyo, I did not care. I mourned my sisters but it meant nothing to me to go into that man’s arms, I told them all I would happily go, with a smile and a proper girl’s bow-and-shuffle. And I took him into the dogwoods—I care about the dogwoods, your dogwoods, Kiyomi—no, Mouth, you tell us what we want to hear, every maiden’s dream, to have a monster all her own—you are no maiden, and without dreams, except of the burning, and the dogwoods—I took him into the dogwoods and let him lift me up against the stubbled bark, and the green seal broke and I thought I would die of it, I wept into his neck but he did not stop, I cried out and the moon looked blankly back, and the fire was in me again, the fire-baby shoved back inside me, and I bit my own hands to keep from biting him—I bit your hands to keep from biting his—and he was pleased with me. He kissed my damp cheeks. He took me by the hand when morning came up the road of Kameko and Kazuyo, the dust-dirt road over the hills, the snake-road, and when I saw the snake I was no more afraid than when I saw the man—I held you all in me, and it was, for a moment, perfect, as you bore up beneath your passion, and disappeared into my heart. You were all through me, and the dogwoods were full of fire—and the burning was by then so great that I fell to the ground before it and begged it to cut me in half—so beautiful, and foolish, they will come, always, dragging wives behind them like quail, and I will teach them about passion, and we will suffer together under the trees and the stars—to eat up the flames and I together, I did not care, I did not care, a whore never cares—

  IV

  Ohoyashima

  Mother did her best, you see.

  But with the dew forming like infant pearls on infant oysters, clinging to his matted thighs, Izanagi seized the pillar which had been Izanagi by the rope-taut length of her hair to the pillar which was stone in the center of the Room of Eight Footsteps. With the dew forming like infant oysters choking on their litters of pearls, clinging to the only woman yet in the world in the fist of the only man yet in Onogoro, he hissed at her.

  “We will do it again, we will do it again and you will not speak unless I speak to you. We will walk the eight footsteps as though there had never been another eight, and we will do it in the proper way, and I will fill you up with islands like this one, and you will not speak, you will not speak, you will never tell anyone about the other eight. I will speak for you. Walk, woman, and fasten your mouth to itself.”

  Izanami walked. She placed one delicate foot before the other, eight times, as before, and she kept her eyes on the weeping floor. The dew made the green into a churning sea, and she thought of the bridge of heaven, and the light singing down the suspensors, and first of all things which lament, she mourned the loss of the perfect and silent bridge.

  At the eighth step, Izanami and Izanagi met, and Izanagi cried out so loudly that the jellyfish paused in their flagellate, and their bodies fluttered up in the echoes like wings.

  “Oh,” he crowed, “what a beauty you are!”

  Izanami stood still, and her eyes were full of pity as a basin catching rain. Her gaze did not falter or change as he pushed her against the wall, her shoulder blades scraping at the scarlet-gold paint which lettered the lacquer. She did not look away in modesty or try to encourage him as he lifted her off of her feet and sunk his teeth into her, sunk his body into her, sunk an island chain into her womb as he grinned into her unsweating skin.

  They were already awake inside her when he pulled back from her, let her body slump against the wall. Dirt and worms and long grasses, camphor and plum and snails and milking goats, rivers full of silver silt and mosquitoes hovering over the shallows, spiders flinging their webs over their arms like winter sweaters, pelicans with their gullets fish-bulging—she swelled up with them in the little house on Onogoro, and the jellyfish sluiced into each other on the beach, wet, suddenly, with the first rain of all things that fall.

  Izanagi was not there when the first of them was born. He was digging in the translucent corpses, shoving the pale, shapeless forms into his cheeks, sucking his fingers dry, slurping at their feeble, still-wavering tendrils. To him, they tasted of his first breath, and he licked his lips hungrily as he swallowed them down.

  And in the house of the pillar, Izanami squatted on the tortoise-floor, biting her hands to keep back screams as the Ohoyashima dropped out of her in a knotted chain, like a necklace popping from her flesh, bead by bead, and she wept, first of all creatures that bled in birth. Awaji fell, already cracked with earthquakes, then Shikoku, so small she hardly felt it clatter from her. The Oki islands came next, shimmering like drops of her own sweat, then Kyushu red with volcanoes, and this scorched her spotless thighs with streaks of black like footprints. Iki and Tsushima emerged amid a thousand blades, and Sado swaddled in green. Then Honshu, and the inlets, the streams and the wide peak of Fuji opened the bones of her hips, and the crack of the bones was terrible, terrible and quiet, echoing only in the empty Room of Eight Footsteps.

  Izanagi entered as Honshu left the womb of Izanami in a clatter of blasted rock, as it was carried away with the others on the churning sea, beneath the bridge of heaven and away. And so it was that he saw none of their first children, and only later walked on their fields and bones. But he saw their first limbed child, he saw it slither from her like an afterbirth, silvery and spineless, its piscine hands clutching helplessly at the air, the colorless blood languid within it, as though it were merely a sack sloshing with water.

  Izanagi saw it with delight and went to devour it, for in its shapeless mass it looked like nothing so much as the pathetic, directionless jellyfish of which he had so much pleasure.

  “No,” hissed Izanami, “it is our child, our firstborn, and I have called it Hiruko.”

  Izanagi snorted. “That soft and stupid thing is no child—not any child of mine, if it is alive at all. You ought not to name the clots that squirm out of you, any more than you name your excrement, or your vomit. Let me eat it, and I will fill you up again.”

  And Hiruko reached out to its father, gills opening in its skin like cracks in opal. It whimpered, and in its infant cry Izanagi heard jellyfish dying, dying, and his own belly gurgling with their weight. He drew back from the silver hand, his throat squeezing itself like a fist.

  “It is my child,” said Izanami calmly, her black hair hanging over her face, “it is beautiful, and if you eat it I will unhinge myself to eat you. I have borne the earth within me; you will be no trouble.”

  “It is a punishment,” he growled, “a curse, because you spoke first. It is a monster, a leech that has become fat on your blood—stamp it out, stamp it out, and atone for your wicked mouth. Crush it with your feet, woman, and your next child will be whole, it will come from my words, not your twisted, rotted exhalations.”

  Izanami held her child to her breast, and its nacre-mouth fastened to its mother—Izanagi watched in revulsion as the first milk of the world flowed into that tiny, boneless body, he could see the white droplets moving under its skin, which flushed in strange colors as it drank. If nothing else about it could be said to be healthy it drank as though dying, as though the breast locked between its toothless gums were all the world, and the sweet sounds of its sighing and mewing, slurping and swallowing filled the house, as such sounds would come to fill houses like habits.

  “Throw it to the floor and crush its skull,” Izanagi screeched, and he tore the leech-child from its cradle of arms and milk. A bellow he could not imagine would have come from such a pitiful chest tore through his ears, and Izanami clawed at him, tearing away the flesh of his arm after her child—and thus the second being in all the world learned to bleed. He took Hiruko, wailing its gruesome song to the grasses of Onogoro, out of the
little house and down to the beach—and Izanami was close behind, her black hair streaming like serpents behind her, and she did not scream, but her mouth curled like a wound.

  Into the sucking morass of thin tentacles and curving, transparent bells, he cast the leech-child’s silvery body, and its awful cry stopped as it sank into the striations of corpses, its eyes confused and stricken, vestigial eyelids opening and closing without understanding. The other bodies closed over Hiruko, its limbs little different from theirs, one more who could not tell where the sea might end.

  Izanagi took the only woman yet in the world by the arm and hauled her back up to the house, to the Room of Eight Footsteps, to the tortoise-floor now grey and slick with tears and blood and seed, and into this he threw her, and fell upon her, and though she made no sound beneath him, he whispered obscenities into the hollow of her throat as he filled her this time with a son, a son she could already feel flaring red and orange within her, and he too could feel the heat of it pouring from her even before he pulled himself off of her body.

  He was gorging again when she bore it, and there was sand between his teeth, and the ruined diamond slush of the creatures dribbling from his chin. He would not have gone to see the new child at all—the feast was waiting, after all—except that something bright and hot swirled up from the house of the pillar, and he turned his head to the top of the bluffs, where first of all things in the world that burned, the little house vomited smoke black as Izanami’s hair into the clear sky.

  “Kagu-tsuchi!” came a howl from the blaze.