Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,115

my snot spat out into a dirty little creek. You’re no one’s son. If you love that dead cunt, go after her. Go to Honshu and push the stones aside until you can clamber inside her—isn’t that where you want to be? The place that would never abide you? Go to it then, and if she doesn’t chew your eyes from your head, rule there and never come out of the dark again. Leave us, leave us alone, no one here can stand the sight of you, not the well-gods nor bucket-gods, not the cloud-gods nor the spider-gods, not the mouse-gods, the cicada-gods, the cut-wood-gods nor the whole-wood-gods, not even the seed-gods, nor their children, the maggot-gods and mushroom-gods, the seawall-gods, the market-gods, the gambling-gods and the sulfur-gods. If you cannot manage to find a camphor tree to lie beneath you and squeeze brats out of her bark, go under the earth—at least we will not hear your wailing there.”

I was proud, and I would not let him see me bolt for the sea and for Honshu—but when he turned to go and scrape another god from the sole of his foot, I ran for the strand and the surf, and the waves panted with joy, padding up to me with their foam dancing. The sun of my sister shone on them, and her gold skirts trailing on the water made me pause—if a man can be said to be worthy of his Mother, he cannot shun his sister, and Ama-Terasu was more truly my sister, herself scooped from Mother-detritus, than any of the god-rutting multitude. Should I not go myself to Takamagahara and see her blazing face for the last time on this side of the sky? Her fiery sleeves stirred me—I cannot say why, nothing she has done before or since has stirred me so much as a spoon would—and I resolved instead to ascend the stair to the high celestial plain, and be a brother to her before I went down to the dead, down to the dead and the dear.

The pale-headed monks trembled; the night had grown cold and they shivered in their idiot-skins.

SIXTH HEAD

Look on my colors, the vermillion and the cobalt, the oxblood and the saffron, the ripple emerald cutting through orchid musculature, silver scales hissing over tangerine, fuchsia streaks and peacock underbelly, the jade and ultramarine of my tail-tip. Look at the blood, at the leak of me, how wide it has become, a wound like a womb [Have I then no colors? Is there no obscene blue to the haunch and heft of Koto] your blue is my blue is my blood is your blood [is my blue my own, still, the blooming blue of my hip against the carnelian waist] we are all so bright with each other. We shine through skin, through skin, and through my [our] mouth comes all this many-daughtered light.

[I thought I would save them. The last two.]

You came to me full as a sail, and the moon on your wrists was like a bracelet, like a dowry. Where did you come from—this endless procession of silver-shoed girls? [Where does any girl come from? We come from each other, over and over, mouth to womb to mouth to womb] In what moon-coated vat are you made, under what mottled sky?

[It was sad for them, I suppose. They were already planning supper with roasted meats and parsnips, cold apples and broiled hawk. They were already peeling the eyes for that damned soup, that stupid, terrible, salty soup I ate every day of my life from the scoured floor of winter to the rafters of summer.]

But not too sad, I think.

[No, not too sad.]

You were utterly like your sisters in every way. [Yes, I suppose we taste the same in the end, but to our mother we were distinct, you know, at least as distinct as plum from cherry blossom] Which is to say slightly more purple than pink, but still a mute, speechless flower, indistinct only from mice or spoons, but not, my love, not from other flowers.

[Sometimes it is so cold in you, and the walls of your throat press in on me] press out against me [like a sarcophagus, and it is as though I am dying again.] But you’re wrong, you know. You didn’t taste the same at all—you were distinct, not as plum from cherry, but as lime from orchid from woodpulp—[and which was I?]

You were sour, and bitter, bitter as birch. Your brow