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