Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,110

lit the edge of the green comb. Fire flared out of the prongs, white and gold as a blanched sun, and the tile-teeth burned slowly down.

In the sudden glare, he lifted one foot and then the other out of the yielding ground; in the sudden glare there was no ground but flesh; in the sudden glare there was no air but the thick fumes of decay spiraling yellow and gray; in the sudden glare there was no Ne no Kuni, there was only Izanami, spread out over the gloam like a shroud, her body become the Root-Country. He was deep in her, in the pooled, moon-shot morass of her stomach, stretched now into a vast and planted field, wavering with untold grasses, with straggling trees clutching at her navel like dead hands. Her breasts rose up stiff and capped with black ice—clouds and cracks clustered at their peaks. Her arms lay out straight as highways, pocked with moldering wells and sinks where her blood had become brackish rivers moving sluggish and sere through the hollows of her elbows. Her knees had split open, and the flora of the dead already bloomed there, asphodel and dragonfruit and oranges like leering faces. Her thighs and calves spread off behind him; he could not see their end. She was gargantuan, the landscape itself, and her skin was broken so often, still streaked with scorch-streaks, that the red curve of her liver rivaled her femur for color-ghast, and her broken ribs rose up in jagged, thin-tipped stalactites. Her heart did not beat, but sat huge in the center of the world like an anchor dropped into an unguessable sea, cut by wiry meridians, its ventricles swollen and spider-blown, congealed and flayed and burning still.

Izanagi’s lips curled back in disgust, and he vomited onto the navel of his wife—but the sight of his trickling sour seeping into her flesh caused his dry throat to retch again, and again, pushing against itself and finding nothing more to give to the country of Izanami.

Somewhere behind the ice-caps of her teeth, a cry began. It hurtled up from the depths of the rocks of her bones, it shook the hand-roots of the trees worming at her sternum. The roof of the Izanami-world shook, and strands of her hair, which he could see now had made up the great darkness stretching over him and over her. Great, ropy shafts of it tumbled down, crashing onto the wet-flesh earth, sending up sprays of stilled, clotted blood. The cry grew until he knew it for the voice of Izanami, and amid the spray of long braids slashing through liquefying vertebrae, Izanagi, first of all things that feared, ran from the bellow of his wife towards the tunnel which had emptied him into her.

“OUT! OUT!” it snarled, and shards of cartilage shot through with starlight and mosses cut through his back like shrapnel. He scrambled up through the mud and the skein of roots, through the centipedes laughing “Here, here!” and the stones gurgling dryly around him like swallowing throats.

“OUT! OUT!” the cry shook the dirt from the tunnel, and it sifted onto the face of Izanagi, it drifted into his eyes, his nose, his mouth, until he could not breathe, nor see. He choked, first of all things in the world to suffocate, and he was filled up with her, her voice stopping his ears like wax, flakes of her skin closing up every open part of him.

The stones moved aside like water and with a cloud of sweat and dust Izanagi was thrown onto the long grass still clutching his burning comb—though it scalded him, he held it before him as though it were his only dear thing. There was a sudden detonation of light, and he sprawled, prostrate as a penitent, on the green earth, beaten down by the sky and covered in the detritus of the Root-Country-which-is-Izanami, soaked in her dead-sour ablutions, clammy and shuddering.

Yet still, the cry barreled up from the weed-massed crevice, and he covered his hands with his face as it serrated the air:

“OUTOUTOUT! OUT OF MY GRAVE, OUT OF MY FLESH, YOU HAVE NO PLACE IN ME! EATER OF CHILDREN, EATER OF DEATH, GLUTTON, GLUTTON, GLUTTON! GO WITH THE CHILDREN WHO ARE TOO BIG FOR YOU TO EAT, GO WITH HONSHU, GO WITH KYUSHU, GO WITH KAGU-TSUCHI. COME NEVER HERE AGAIN, I WILL LET NO ONE PASS. I WILL DEVOUR EVERYTHING YOU MAKE, I WILL DESTROY EVERYTHING YOU SIRE WITH THAT SICK, MEWLING BODY.