Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,10

into the night.

7

Despair.

I am blind. Still in my statue-eyes I die in my steps blooming red and black. The glyphbody flies apart, together. The Stone burns all through me. Talmudic Walls rise, recede. I dive, I dart, I runrunrun. I know the way to away and away. Infatuated by motion my feet make love to dirt, couple with jeweled stones full of corrosive oxygenblood, death of a thousand cuts executed on my own human haunches, never running fast enough to escape the threat of Purpose/non-Purpose. The Mazescape sloughs off its icy corselet as I scramble from the Angel’s shade, but still I am the wasteland, white within white. Whales hunt for fat seals across the icy expanse of my torso, wolves gnaw at my ears. My septum is pierced with a barbed harpoon. I shudder in my own cold, watching my lips turn cream-blue, reflected endlessly in the glaciers of my transparent fingers. I am snow, I am stone, I am wind. I hollow myself to make shelter, scooping out shovelfuls of slush from my stomach, my thighs, my skull. I break open, holding this body together with screams. Perhaps when it is done I can crawl within the now-palace of stretched skin over the frame of icicles and become warm. Perhaps I will understand.Careening, pinwheel stride around a cul-de-sac, I kneel before a crumbling Wall—perhaps with bricklaid eyes it saw the birth of the Labyrinth in the longestago, squeezed from the womb of some unutterable hundred-armed Ionic bear-goddess with screaming eyes, covered in slime and dust, shooting its arms out into geometric monstrosity, eating worlds to make its new limbs and mouths and voices, fulminating in the shadow of gargantua, suckling at its mother’s shaggy body until she died—

I push its broken bricks back into the Wallbody, weeping with mortar of tears and saliva, fingernails torn and leaking white liquid, blood of pulverized moonstone flowing through me burning, burning, burning, the witch on the platform of my diaphragm, flames shooting from her mouth into my veins. Everything is fire. I grapple at the broken rock and dust, cramming it into my colorless mouth, crushing it into nothing, tasting the sour pencil-lead and hashish flavor of it, the gore of an ageing Wall, muddy intestines spilled out onto the careless Road into my careless belly. In, in, in, the tawny supper of clay, salted by manic tears, through the mash of dirt crowding I speak in tongues; Door-tongues, Hare-tongues, Sky-tongues, Trout-tongues, sordid demon-tongues, flower-tongues, snake-tongues like nooses, tobacco-tongues and belly-tongues, darkbody-tongues and white-eyed tongues, reptile-tongues and black wine-tongues, girl-tongues and foot-tongues, pummeling tongues of non-being and cadaverous tongues of lunatic frogs, O blasphemy, blasphemy in my tongue of tongues with the Wall dribbling out the sides of my wretched mouth. O holy Meal of Myself, Queen of the Center-that-is-not, babbling up at staircases that lead everywherenowhere, monoliths gawking at the clowning moon.

Exploding frenetic devourer, I eat the Labyrinth and it eats me, each grinning with stringy meat dangling like earrings from a hungry mouth. Conquering, driving it before me through my body, chasing it, knowing that time will come for the kill, screaming into it, filling the world with a rape of sound. O send out your Doors and I will splinter them! Sacred gibberish of Maze oracles too full of self, Road blasting through my abdomen like a cannonball, paving me flat, pushing, pushing, forward motion, reversal verboten, it is one-way, the Way of Tongues, the Way of Body, the Way of the After-Seeker. Breathe, breathe, lungs, or the Wall will strangle you like a criminal. And so I draw a rasping, shearing breath, inhaling the revelatory dust into my fishy pink lungs, maidenhair cilia, exchanging air for earth. Elementals dance in trapezoidal patterns, and always within. I will not yield, I will not let the Labyrinth trap me into belonging. I have eaten it, as I ate the compass rose, and it sits in my belly like a thrashing mollusk, throwing out the shrapnel of its hydrochloric shell into my stomach-lining, into my howling womb Walls, into the deeps of my secret throats. Of all those infinite thousands of tentacled Maze-arms I have one fleshly sucker within me, a grisly victory. In the sign of this body thou shalt conquer, thou shalt slash and rend flesh, thou shalt Devour for it is thy nature, to Devour what is Sought. I am I, and no other. On my lips the Wall disintegrates, on my lips it dies. I refuse.