Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,11

I refuse these mewling seductions. I am I. I move within the Labyrinth, and it moves within me. If there is madness to be swallowed, I will swallow it. But for the crashing chariots of Purpose I cannot halt.

8

I whittle the waxen surface of Time.

White crows cackle at the blackening dawn. Dewy air finds me curled in the wreckage of the Wall, liquid light hair streaming into the sky like a cloud of gangrenous butterflies. The morning so thick in my mouth, the pulverized brick on my tongue, ancient mortar like congealed vodka pouting at my uvula. Vagaries of the morning after paroxysm, ache of jaws recently frantic. (I contain an abundance of whiteness.) Still shivering in copious plagues. Penumbral lacerations and ruins of hallowed sylph-hips. I lie here, pressed down into the ground, unable to move, to pry open painted eyes and coerce action from opiate corporeality. Float in the dark, girl-creature, it isn’t the sun on your limbs, it is the fire. Is there a tree heavy with peaches for your breakfast, waiting fat and friendly and golden outside the body barrier you cower in? Arboreal messiah, full of sugary seraphim, the grails of pitted cores? No, there is dust. Outside you, inside you. Dust. Toothless sky gumming your fingers like a grandmother.

I move. I have to. I am—there is no tree adjacent, of course. It would have been too docile, for the Road to have twisted and turned to serve my belly and its cat-howl, scowling empty. But it does not take long, no longer than a half-sliver of silver sun-glide, to locate a copse of cold green fruit trees. Under all juice flows down my lips, running the pigment of the Angel’s art like watercolors. Impressionist, I stand tall and still within the sky-armed trees.

What remains when fire has filled the viscera and vanished? The oily tracks of naphtha, steaming black arteries, barren metallic smoke-smell, liver glazed like a vase, glossy and intricate. The lungs are blazed to crystal, and the long necklaces of veins strung with gleaming ligaments, each capillary popping clear of the flesh like a carnelian bead. What is left when the grimy veil of delirium has passed, with its greasy flames of green and blue? The Void, the Void only, that is the Labyrinth and that is I. When it is over, we remain, as we have alwaysbeen. The Others are ripples.

But I am troubled, I am haunted. Function, meaning pry at me like hungry children. There is power here, in my place within the life of the Maze. I am a terrible whirlwind, the eater of cities, but I choke on my own clouds and skirts of dust, my long ropes of sand. Wild roses on the Wallface, and the Void giggling under a veil of waving carpets of summer grass. And I, burning, falling, raw as bark-stripped pine. There is no sound where I step, for I am not really here, this shadow is not mine, I swear to myself that I am more than this, that transcendence exists somewhere, and a secret avalanche far off rumbles like the clearing of a diamond throat.

I am tired.

9

Whither and how. Shall I go on?

Do I dare to crawl on my belly through this pilgrimage of grass and earth? A pilgrimage with no Rapture at its dread terminus? Wear my knees to inkwells over endless Paths. Shaken by the spidery intrusions of words like snaking belladonna, I am not so firmly forward moving as I was. The clouds are threatening admirals, dusted in golden medals of sunlight. I have not heard the shuffling gait of a Door on my trail in days. It is strange, the ineffable silence. Do they no longer want me? Has my smell become less delectable in their nostril/keyholes? All around is barren, Walls of bare copper wire and a scalded Road, and I am the most blasted acre of this waste. I have seen scurryings in the corners, I have heard scratching feet. Yesterday a thrush shook its wings of rain nearby. But it would not speak to me, it turned its little brown back. I am verboten, nameless, null. There is a sliver in the pad of my ring finger, the reliquary of my own flesh cradling a breath of ash, tinged in blood and vinegar from lips of sorrowful countenance. In my earlobes thorns, my eyelids draped in shrouds with the imprints of a thousands faces emblazoned in sweat, a spear entering my mouth and piercing