Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,119

silly tricks I played, would not spend her nights laughing at me behind her hand, when my desire shivered and snapped between us like a lightning-struck tree.

In her hall of pearl and jasper, laid out in flecks from one side of heaven to the other, I pissed out her whistling tea, I squatted and shat out her awful, starchy rice—the pearl stank and the jasper steamed and I was well pleased. She pretended not to notice. She sent our boys to clean it, and the clang of their iron hands on the lacquer scraped my ears spotless.

I walked through the rice paddies we had planted together, hands in the mud, and hers so bright under the sludge that I thought the sludge was itself gold, and what rice would grow from such soil! With my belt of cirrus flashing black, I kicked through her retaining walls and jumped from terrace to terrace, splashing in the sudden water as paddy flooded into paddy, and the rice—not so different than any other farmer’s rice—spoiled in the blinding light of Takamagahara. At this she did cry out, and sent our boys to shore up the walls again, but their ore-padded knees rusted in the standing wreckage. Her face was wide and twisted, shining in terrace after ruined terrace. I laughed—the Rice of Heaven was not even good for wine.

But she did nothing to me, she knelt and poured the tea that evening as though nothing had happened, as though she had Mother’s patience, and I could not see her stomach flaring through her robes, and her hunger. Yellow-faced fool, she could not touch Mother’s patience with the longest of her beams.

Sometimes I feel as though there is something else living within me, a smoke-mouthed and sneer-eyed creature which is me-but-not-me, and I cannot speak to it, but it drives me, drives me after dragons and Mothers and causes me, in its salt-in-wound morbidity, to push further than even I would have if it did not sit like a crow on my spleen, cinching in my guts with its claws. And so I think it was this thing which saw the Piebald Colt of Heaven prancing it its bronze pen, which saw the colt and hopped, horribly, from one black foot to the other.

It must have been this thing in me which opened the pen and put out its hand for the colt to nose, which brought an apple and a lump of sugar and murmured to the beast as it chewed the sweet, wet meat. It could not have been I who stroked its blond mane, called him a good beast, and a kind beast, and put a nose to his. It, and not I, must have felt his hot breath on its cheeks and heard the soft snort as it cut into his flesh, peeling that gold pelt from the muscle, all in one apple-swift strip. I could not have watched the blood of the Piebald Colt of Heaven seep into the celestial plain, the creature I had raised with my sister, had called gentle, and lovely, and ours.

Perhaps it was this thing which had had statues made of it, which stomped snakes with clay soles.

It could not have been I who threw it into the chambers of Ama-Terasu, who laughed at the sodden slap of the carcass on her polished floor, at the high, flute-pale screams of our daughters as they leapt from their sewing, red hair flying, red eyes flashing.

It must have been the storm-seed inside me, for I could never do those things to such a woman as the sun became.

SEVENTH HEAD

I am dragging blood behind me like menses—the grass is full of it, clotted with it, hungry for it, and I pick myself up over the hillocks and dells with a belly bloody and inflamed, a mass of maidenheads burst and gaping *we sit on the floor of the monster like a blister of blood, heavy and black, and we seep through, we seep through, and stamp our wet wombprints on the path from what was once our house to what is now our nest* I did not mean for this to happen *did you think you could eat a thing and not become it? We always knew, we who have eaten the soup of eyes every day from birth; what is there we have not seen between the eight of us?* Kaori, Kaori, it hurts *yes, it always hurts, we knew that, too, but blood is blood,