The Mythic Dream

by Dominik Parisien

  You cannot fight an idea, Eric realizes as the man from Craigslist peels his skin down and folds it into Eric’s mouth like a piece of burst bubblegum. You cannot fill true emptiness with substance, he thinks as the man from Craigslist feeds him his own tongue, his own teeth, his own jaw. As he ceases to be—and yet remains as hunger incarnate—he intuits: Ideas do not exhaust like horses. They do not set like the sun. It is possible to chase an idea forever; it will consume you even as it outruns you. His father didn’t teach him that; for once, he’s learned something on his own.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  * * *

  I’ve always found the story of Erysichthon to be pretty straightforwardly delicious: a man who commits a terrible deed is punished with an appropriate and horrifying curse. (If only it worked that way in real life!) There are so many fun ways to potentially adapt it—including as a body-horror cozy mystery, which I still think is not a half-bad idea—but once I started writing “The Things Eric Eats Before He Eats Himself,” I found myself unable to unsee Erysichthon as anything but a pawn. Not sympathetic, exactly. Rather, as a part of a larger system of entitlements and appetites, one that ultimately destroys almost everything it touches. Erysichthon learns too late what so many other people already know: if there’s a list of things to be eaten—without compunction, without compassion, without mercy—chances are you’ll eventually be on it, too.

  * * *

  CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

  FLORILEGIA

  OR

  SOME LIES ABOUT FLOWERS

  BY

  * * *

  AMAL EL-MOHTAR

  “You can’t have flowers made of claws.”

  —Alan Garner, The Owl Service

  HER FIRST MEMORY IS A loss of sun. Where there was warmth on the white crown of her head, there is now cold shade, and two round shapes blotting out her light, blinking.

  Her second memory is a loss of thorns. Where she was sharp, fierce, protected, she feels now smooth, soft, and vulnerable, pressed against green and yielding grass.

  Her third memory is a loss of height. She has never felt so far from the sky, so lost to the wind.

  Threaded through all this, the loss of roots unspools in her like a scream, the loss of rain, the loss of earth, the loss of everything she knows as food, and she has never, not in the bleakest midwinter or the driest midsummer, felt so hungry.

  Small wonder, then, that she kissed Lleu Llaw Gyffes at their first meeting.

  She was only trying to eat him.

  * * *

  Blodeuwedd lies naked in the orchard earth, trying to grow roots.

  The day is miserable and gray, but not cold; her skin warms the mud beneath it. She breathes in long, deep breaths, and wills the hunger blooming in her center to still.

  The hunger is always an ache, a shadow pushing against the inside of her skin. Today it is her head that hurts, her brow that pulses with pain; other days it is her calf, her breast, her belly.

  She has been a year in the house of Lleu Llaw Gyffes, and has learned many things: how to run a household; how to use needle and thread; how to receive guests. She eats meat fresh from her husband’s hunting, drinks beer from her women’s brewing, listens to music from traveling minstrels singing the praise of great lords and wizards making marvels of the countryside. She has learned to endure her husband’s presence and make use of his absence, and she has learned to treat the hunger in her like a sucking wound.

  But she does not know how to cure it. All she can do is pack it with wet earth, fragrant air, and grit her teeth against being turned inside out.

  Lying in the orchard helps. Whenever Lleu leaves—as he often does—to hunt, or fight, or do whatever else men do, she slips from the house to find a corner where none will seek her for the space of an hour. Whether it is the touch of loam against her body, or the fact that it is hers alone, her secret, she can’t say—but it helps.

  Bees thrill to her fingertips, buzz their puzzlement at her shape. She opens her mouth and lets them sip from her there, tastes the pollen on their dainty legs. She imagines the fields they’ve scoured for her; she imagines them carrying the wetness of her tongue over the walls, across meadows and arbors, spreading her across distances farther than her eyes or voice can reach.

  The thought trembles in her like light on water, and she feels something release. She licks her lips and lies there, perfectly still, and does not stir when it begins to rain.

  * * *

  On their wedding night, Lleu told her the story of his birth, and hers too.

  “. . . and when Arianrhod was made to leap over my uncle Math’s wand, I tumbled out of her, and my uncle Gwydion scooped me up. But because I was proof of her shame, my mother, Arianrhod, decreed that I would never have a name unless she named me, nor be armed unless she armed me, nor wed to any woman of any race on earth. But my uncles were cleverer than she. Between them they tricked her into naming me without knowing who I was; they tricked her into arming me by making her fear invasion. But last, and best, my uncle Gwydion gathered the blossoms of oak, meadowsweet, and broom, and he shaped them into you, Blodeuwedd, and that is how we come to be married, my love, and why we lie together this night.”

  His eyes were like clouds that bore no rain, like stone begging to be broken through.

  It sounds, she thought, as if your uncles forced you on the body of Arianrhod, and when she tried to deny you, made me for you to force yourself on.

  But his hand on her arm had the strength of a gale, and she knew this thing, this man, could kill her as easily as his uncles had plucked her from the fields—unless she swayed with him, kept quiet, and smiled.

  All her words bent into a flower budding from her tongue. She bit it back. When he kissed her, she filled his mouth with blood and petals, planted her silence in his body like a seed.

  * * *

  “Blodeuwedd? Blodeuwedd!”

  She hears the name as if from a distance, as if filtered through dark cloth. She opens her eyes: Lleu, in the mizzle and the gray, his face flushed so hot she fancies she can see steam rising from his cheeks.

  Her peace shrivels, and her head pounds with pain.

  “What are you doing, woman? What were you thinking? You’ll catch your death—”

  He drapes her in the wet, muddy robes she’d shed, scoops her up off the ground and covers her with his body.

  She lets him. She does not ask why he’s returned earlier than expected, and makes herself very small in his arms.

  “The shame of it, my lady, if anyone but I saw you thus—”

  She looks at him, and looks at him, and thinks, You don’t see me.

  “What’s this,” he says, lifting a gloved hand to her brow. “Have you bruised yourself, my love? Best you go to bed and warm up. I’ll call my uncles—”

  “No,” she says, with her whole body. “No, no need to trouble them,” in a voice like the rain. She reaches up, twines her fingers through his, and slowly draws his hand back from her cheek, smiling. “I will rest, as you say.” Then, mechanically, “It is good to see you home so soon.”

  He relaxes. “I only returned to accompany a visiting scholar from the abbey, and must leave again quickly to make up the time.”

  She nods, winces as he kisses the dark space on her brow. It darkens further.

  He sees nothing in her green and gold-flecked eyes of how much she longs to tear his gentle face apart.

  * * *

  A month after the wedding, Lleu’s uncles, Math and Gwydion, came to visit.

  Blodeuwedd felt the candles flicker at their arrival, remembered her world dimming in the shadow of their heads. But she received them as a lady should, calling for food and drink and entertainment, then drew back with women’s work between her hands.

  “Are you happy, Lleu?” asked Math, as if Blodeuwedd weren’t there. “Is she everything a wife should be?”

  Lleu, who was indeed happy, smiled. “I am; she is beautiful, gracious to guests, and keeps the household in o
rder.”

  “That’s as it should be,” said Gwydion gruffly. “That’s how we made her. Meadowsweet, useless but for its scent; broom for humility and neatness; oak for hospitality.”

  “I always wondered about that,” said Lleu thoughtfully. “Has not the broom thorns, and the oak great strength?”

  Blodeuwedd’s hands hovered over her embroidery.

  Math laughed. “Aye, Nephew, but we only took the flowers of each. Soft and pretty and fragrant they were, like cutting roses off at the head. Whoever heard of a blossom with claws?”

  She pushed the needle through the fabric on her lap, and said nothing.

  * * *

  Lleu leaves again; meanwhile the purpling on her forehead spreads across her pale skin like a storm, and the pain hoods her eyes. She dresses her hair to cover it, and goes to the library.

  It too is an orchard, after a fashion—full of dead trees, dead skins, dead plants, dead insects mounted on pins. She feels this in common with them. The library offers a different comfort: if she can no longer grow roots to sate her hunger, perhaps she can learn to die. To catch her death, as her husband says, by lingering with the dead.

  Often she comes here to read of Arianrhod—gleaning, from half-mentions in tales and ballads, some sense of the mother-in-law she has never met. Arianrhod is almost as much a mother to her as to Lleu, after all; Blodeuwedd would not exist without her interdiction forbidding wives. But she has never been able to hate Arianrhod for that—only to feel, deep where her roots aren’t, a fury that her life is a cheat, and to so little purpose.

  She picks up a herbiary, opens it, looks at the drawings within. Some feel familiar, though she can’t read the words beside them—a strange, toothy script in a language she hasn’t been taught, proceeding from the wrong margin.

  “May I help you, my lady,” murmurs a voice from her side. She turns to look.

  Dark hair and eyes, skin brown as branches. Beautiful, feels Blodeuwedd suddenly, in the heart of her, where her breath vanishes; beautiful, a strike and a searing, a jagged line of light.

  She feels all this before she thinks to ask, “Who are you?”

  “My name is Adain, my lady, lately of Penllyn.” She smiles. “I am a scholar—I arrived today with your lord, to consult the library. I had heard you were . . . indisposed—”

  Blodeuwedd nods. “My apologies for not meeting you on arrival. I’ve been unwell.”

  She can’t stop looking at Adain’s face.

  “This book,” she says brusquely, holding it out. “What does it say?”

  Adain accepts it, looks at the open page. “It is a Levantine treatise on the oak; see, here it speaks of the different parts of the tree and their uses.”

  “What,” she says, pointing, “does this part say?”

  “Ah—that the oak is more likely to be struck by lightning than any other tree.”

  Blodeuwedd grabs the book back suddenly, shuts it with a snap. Her forehead throbs; she turns away, closes her eyes. “Forgive me; I have a terrible headache, and should rest.”

  She sets the book down, and walks away before Adain can say another word.

  * * *

  “Husband,” said Blodeuwedd, hair spread over her pillow like a season, “were you not a man until you had a name, a weapon, and a wife?”

  “No, my lady,” he said, smiling, running his thumb along her cheek, “I was only a boy.”

  “You gave me a name; if I had a weapon, and a wife, could I also be a man?”

  His laughter scythed a bright, hot line along her chest. “No, my lady.”

  She wet her lips, and smiled. “Why not?”

  “Because you were made by magic, my lady, from flowers.”

  “I do not understand, my husband,” she said carefully. “Magic made you a boy, from your mother, and now you are a man. If I won myself a weapon and a wife, why should I not be a man, and conquer lands to reign over, as you do?”

  Lleu thought on that. “It is because,” he said finally, “you were made for me, belong to me, and I have decreed that you are my wife. And once you are my wife you can be no other thing.”

  * * *

  Blodeuwedd spends a full day abed, sleeping fitfully, twisting her long yellow hair into her fists. The dull ache of hunger in her sharpens itself against thoughts of Adain—she hears her voice again, over and over, saying “my lady,” so unlike when Lleu says it, the same words but the meaning as different as day from night, as bird from worm.

  How could the same words mean so many things? Rain was rain, and sun was sun, and earth was earth. Only wizards could change one thing into another—honor into shame, maiden into mother, a mother’s curses into a wife.

  Her head hurts so much.

  She instructs her attendants to have breakfast brought to her the next morning, and to summon Adain to share it with her.

  When Adain arrives, a book in her hand, the noise in her head subsides.

  “I apologize,” says Blodeuwedd, gesturing for Adain to sit down, “for my rudeness yesterday. Is there anything you lack?”

  “Nothing at all, my lady,” says Adain quietly, looking at her. “Except to know the cause of your pain, and whether it is in my power to help with it.”

  Blodeuwedd shrugs. “It is a small matter that is always with me. But tell me of yourself, of your studies. Where does your interest lie?”

  Adain holds her gaze a long moment. “In plants and animals, my lady. The study of natural history.”

  Silence lengthens like a shadow between them.

  “How interesting,” says Blodeuwedd at last, politely. “I hope you find many books on the subject.”

  “My lady,” says Adain, lowering her voice, and her gaze, “I came especially because I heard of your own history.”

  Blodeuwedd holds very still.

  “The marvel of Gwynedd,” says Adain quietly. “A meadow made maiden. The fairest woman the world has ever known.”

  “And you wanted to see for yourself,” says Blodeuwedd, trying to swallow the thorns in her throat, to keep the bitterness from her voice. “Well—I am as you find me. The work of wizards. A singular specimen.”

  Adain winces. “My lady, it is I who should apologize—”

  “It is well, Adain,” she says curtly. “I must beg you to excuse me—it goes ill with me again, and I would lie down.”

  Adain looks briefly miserable as she stands, and the glimpse of it lashes at Blodeuwedd, a mix of sorrow and triumph. To have caused her pain. To have spilled her own into her.

  “I brought you this, my lady,” says Adain, holding out the book she brought—a slender quarto volume with a bouquet of lilies embroidered into the cover and spine. “I hoped it might interest you. It speaks of the language of flowers.”

  Blodeuwedd stares at her. “What do you know of the language of flowers?”

  “I know,” she says, holding her gaze, “that they hunger for depth and height, for sun and rain, for the touch of insects, and that all men see of them are their pretty colors and sweet smells.”

  Blodeuwedd looks at the book for a long time. When she senses Adain about to withdraw, she says, “Wait.”

  Adain does.

  “Come closer,” she says, and Adain obeys. Blodeuwedd reaches for her and draws her closer still, till she sits near enough that they can bend their foreheads together. Blodeuwedd lifts her hair from the spreading bruise at her brow.

  “What can you tell me of this?”

  Adain hesitates, hovers her fingers above the bruise. Blodeuwedd watches her, then closes her eyes as Adain touches her.

  She shivers, and Adain gasps as petals push past Blodeuwedd’s skin, unfurling toward her hand.

  The relief of it is unspeakable. Blodeuwedd all but goes limp from it.

  “It is an anemone, my lady,” breathes Adain, tracing its edges.

  Blodeuwedd shakes her head, dazed with how light, how clear, it feels. “That can’t be. I was only made of three flowers.”

  “Aye, and
people are made of flesh and blood and bone, but that isn’t what comes out of our mouths in speech. You—” Adain looks at her with such tenderness that Blodeuwedd can’t bear it, looks away. “Have you been biting your tongue all this time, my lady?”

  Blodeuwedd bites her lip in answer, hardly hearing Adain over the peace of her body, the absence of pain. She fixes her eyes on the book Adain brought. “Tell me, then—what do anemones mean?”

  “They signify fading hope and loss. But”—Adain brushes Blodeuwedd’s hair away from the flower, smiles—“they are also said to mean anticipation.”

  “How,” whispers Blodeuwedd, looking back to her, “do we know which it is?”

  Adain holds her gaze while her fingers work delicately beneath the bloom.

  “Context,” she says, and plucks it.

  * * *

  There came a day when Lleu was knocked from his horse in war, shot through with many arrows, but he survived, prevailed, and his borders widened.

  There came a day when Lleu was gored by a great boar during a hunt, but he survived, slew it, made a brush of its bristles for Blodeuwedd’s hair.

  There came a day when Blodeuwedd watched Lleu’s naked body as he slept and made a knife of her eyes, a tusk of her teeth, and imagined unseaming his belly, imagined ripping into the meat of him and feasting on his heat. She made a noise deep in her throat, and his eyes opened, and she murmured, wanting him to hear—

  “Can nothing kill you, Lleu?”

  He smiled at her, and when he spoke his words had the ring of enchantment, incantation.