Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,105

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