Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,113

| softly as a woman’s fingers. | I could not move, could not breathe, | could only widen your soft black eyes and try to take all of me in, | the shimmer of a thousand rainbows across your breast, | the dark promise of my blue-black stomach, heaving and swelling for its promised Kyoko. I have eradicated all human women from this bed | already I was confused, I could not tell if those colors were snake or sister | already it was becoming confused, the voice of my throat of my belly of my lungs of my tongue was not my own, was becoming (ours) was becoming theirs, | the rooster screamed once, but not again. | I am the truly pure, and your mock marriage dissolved into love when faced with the multitude of my skin.

| Serpent! | Oh, Kyoko, when you raised up your arms! | Monster! | Oh, Kyoko, when your hair fell over his cheek! | Oh, Monster, your eyes were so bright, so bright, as if they glowed from within a jar of grass! | If he could touch the part of you that first glimpsed my flesh, | moons within moons moving under that silver-green skin | flesh you should have abhorred but cannot | how could you | I | think I | you | would abhor | this body of bodies | myself? | he might be able to crush it, wrap it in seaweed and boil it into something sweet and small. | I have always been sweet and small. | But even if he could tear you from my ruby flanks and run back to the fire-lit hall with you under his arm, how could he live, knowing that for a flashing instant you had loved a Monster? I sometimes wonder if he let me take you, Kyoko | after Kaya | after Kiyomi | after Kameko | after Kazuyo, because it was easier than suffering that humiliation. | After all, there are always more of us left to take. And I had never seen such eyes, such living eyes, staring at me as though they were all the eyes I had ever stirred into salt. |

The Mouth quaked for you, | I quaked for you | it did not wish to wait for contemplation, as though the man were an altar and I, penitent on knees I do not possess. | I bent my knees for both of us, on the thin bed-roll, and your eyes, | open to bursting, and as I took you into me you cried out, | Serpent! | ripping the leaves from the trees. | Monster! | filled with you, | swallowed into myself | writhing, | your eyes were so great above me, multiplied, floating, | floating | floating over | you | me, | in | you | me, and there was nothing else, only me, | us | in the dark, and four strange hands reaching out through the | meat-and-maiden, | four pale hands drawing a mouth | Mouth | over me like a veil and helping me to step up, | step up, | into the fold.

It was all whiteness, | and the smell of clean skin,

| just as I had thought it might be. |

VI

HONSHU

When Izanagi had cleaned himself of children and, dragging them behind him like quails, run from the cleft of Ne no Kuni, the face of the world had changed. The Heaven-Spanning Bridge was not even a shadow in the sky, and the way to Onogoro had been lost in the churning sea. Even the jellyfish had gone far below, helpless to avoid the great islands’ motion—for the children of Izanami groaned with her rage and moved together to huddle their heads against their shoulders, all in a line, like mourners, and hide away from her cry.

It was because of this that Kagu-tsuchi and his sisters had been able to step from the silver beaches of Onogoro onto Honshu, and Kyushu, and Awazi. They grew quickly, and Kagu-tsuchi became so bright that the islands could not bear him, and taking stick-limbed, stone-browed Hani-yama-hime who rarely smiled as his wife, he hid himself away in her, and was seen after only in flare and flame, sparkling fleetingly on the face of the world like an eye opening, then closing again. Closed up in each other, they had a wonderful child, who was called Waka-musubi, and in her hair grew the first silkworms, and the