Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,114

first mulberries, and out of her navel sprouted five grains like secret flowers. Midzu-ha-no-me, pleasant and laughing, laid herself out over the body of her sister, and glittered in pond and lake, stream and pool, golden in the light of Ama-Terasu, who had lifted her yellow skirts and climbed up to take possession of Takamagahara, the high celestial plain. Her brother the moon kept to himself, and took peacefully the lesser part of Takamagahara, which was black and filthy with stars.

Izanagi washed deities off of himself like dirt. The children of his children began to double and triple themselves like jellyfish thrown up onto the sand. The world was becoming filled, and only I remembered Onogoro; only I remembered Izanami.

Of course, Mother kept her word: in the midst of all that birth, things died quietly, in shadows, and went down to her, settled in huts of the dead, nestled in her belly, her sternum, her kneecaps. And for everything that died, Izanagi caused more to spring up. In this way their marriage went on and on.

I wept. In my clouds like cups I wept. The waves swelled up to meet me, eager, adoring, and I did not think they were beautiful; they stank of salt and fish guts. I looked at the earth, merrily rutting with itself, and I hated it, I hated its green and the light that made it green and the laughter that came from well-gods and bucket-gods and cloud-gods and spider-gods and mouse-gods and cicada-gods and cut-wood-gods and whole-wood-gods and seed-gods shaking in ecstasy as one topped the other topped the other, producing maggot-gods and mushroom-gods and seawall-gods and market-gods and gambling-gods and sulfur-gods. In none of them had the name of Izanami created even the slightest vibration, a bee’s wing or gooseflesh rising.

Izanami! Poor Mother so wronged and so burned by wild and ungrateful children. Midzu was not enough—but I would have put out her flames, had I been born first. I could have rained down water of any sort she wanted. And I made Father tell me about her, over and over as I grew and the clouds around my wrist became more and more black. He did not want to speak of it—he could make children without her, didn’t I see, it didn’t matter where she rotted like a fat fungus, green and horrid. But little by little, like knotted rope pulled from his mouth snag by snarl, he gave me my Mother, couched in curses.

And I wept. I sent my clouds over the giggling, groping ground and flooded out the well-gods with my tears. I made the land dry up in great grey patches, where I would not let the rain fall—no rain should fall while the Mother of rain is a bed of spoiled flesh under the stones. I dashed the bucket-gods against their wells, and whipped the back of the cloud-gods, I chased the spider-gods and the mouse-gods and the cicada-gods into cracks and crevices, trembling in the wet and sudden cold. I cut the whole-wood-gods and sealed up the cut-wood-gods, and I scattered the seed-gods on barren rock. I drowned the maggot-gods and smashed the seawall-gods with my ugly, dog-earnest waves, I bankrupted the market-gods with washed-out crops, spoiled the games of the gambling-gods, dowsed the yellow fumes of the sulfur-gods with freezing mist. The mushroom-gods took no notice; springing svelte and sidelong from the grey flesh of the Mother-below, they were blind to rain or sun, and cared for nothing.

The land blighted, and that, that I thought beautiful, as holes opened up and fruit rotted on the ground, as green went to ashen and the smell of meat left to flies wafted through the wind, as the stupid, mewling, crowding earth began to look less like the greedy, gorged Father-face and more like the beautiful, ascetic Mother-corpse, then, oh, then I found it beautiful.

And while I sat cross-legged in the center of this new, tenebrous wasteland, while I sat happy for the first time since I opened my eyes in that murky stream, seeing all around me reflecting Mother, always Mother, her blight and her blear, Father came striding ford by fallow, and as Fathers will do, he slapped my face with the flat of his palm, called me child and woman, blubbering and weak as worms. My cheeks burned and I tried to be ashamed of my grief, but could not find reproach within me.

“You didn’t even know her,” he hissed, “you’re nothing but her shit and