Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,104

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,