Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,108

you think she could lose before she no longer held you precious as the soup-eyes? Mothers forget, it is what they do. They cannot always be expected to be wet at the teat and smiling. And the prettiest girl, even the prettiest-save-the-last, does not always make the best soup.

{She panted with the effort of having me,} all mothers do {sweat ran down her face and back like delta-silt into the ocean.} All mothers sweat so. {The scythe rushed through the tender plants, her brown hair flapping like a nightingale’s wing in time to the strokes. She told me that imagined she must have looked like deathshead, this young woman with her great scythe and plain black dress, weeds falling before her like ranks of soldiers.} No, darling, I am Death, and I bend the weeds, and I hold you inside me, and you are my child, and nevermore hers. {Death with long-lashed eyes,} eyes in soup, eyes in children, eyes in me {gliding through the fields like a shadow, Death beautiful and terrible, with her gentle face and singing blade. Only the great curve of her belly called her liar, called her not-Death; she swung the scythe high, grimaced with the effort of the swing; her arms burned. She was no doctor, to induce labor peaceably in a clean room, but gave herself to the strain of her muscles in the sun. With a downward stroke she felt something move inside her, like a stone grinding aside.

It was the weed-trees for you, then, the little saplings not yet grown. {She fell to her knees in the sweet-smelling earth, strands of grass stuck to her hair.} And with the cicadas in your ears from the moment of your birth, you never learned to listen. {I was born small, but my lips were perfectly formed, and so pink.} They tasted of orchid, of orchid and crabgrass.

{The sun was hot so early in the day when we woke and Kiyomi was gone. The man who was neither lovely nor soft took me by the wrist—his hand went all the way around my bones!—and his face went blotched and black. He accused my mother of cheating him, said that he would burn her house and poor father’s fields if he was not given the wife he was promised. He said the others died because mother did not give proper obeisance to the gods; it spared him because he was pious} I spared him because his blood smelled of oil and shit { he took me there, that morning, into the rear rooms, and I cried, oh, I cried} poor Kaya-bird {I screamed and squealed as he tore my clothes, and he stopped up my mouth with his tabi and my tears soaked it through, and he pulled the bloody veil of my sisters’ weddings over my face and his breath came in hitching gasps, frightened, mouse-chirp wheezes.}

I was sleeping when you came, but your sobs, your sobs were like thrushes singing {He dragged me from my mother’s house and she did not cry—I called back to her over and over—why are you not crying?} You ask too much of mothers, to weep over every child they lose. {Mother, why won’t you weep for me? And my father looked at his feet, mumbled that this was the way of marriages, sometimes, and one doesn’t approve, but when the grandsons are underfoot no one recalls the ceremony.} He fell to his knees in immobile ecstasy when I reared up from the waving weeds, holding his arms out, {and I stopped crying, for at least this I understood, understood I was no different, that the man who was neither young nor old was still dripping from between my legs and this was no shield, a wife is no safer than a maid} and I sighed into my Kaya-bird, nuzzling your new-beloved face with my own, crooning to you in the Mouth-dialect, knowing you would understand it, hear the new chorus behind the lower registers, for you were open and pulseate, and I was ready, hungry for your form to fill the void I carry like an egg within me, ready to be full of you, like a pale moon, and heavy. { I held up my arms like a child waiting to be picked up, and the colors of the snake’s mouth, oh, they were brighter than festival lanterns, and in the wavering throats like weeds I saw my sisters’ mouths opening and closing like anemones, and