Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,13

are false prophets. They are cheap copies. Truth lies with the Man and Revelation in his Bar.” The creature inched towards me, his fat green body swaying from side to side, black eyes roving over me like sweaty hands. “I’m not surprised. We Crocodiles are spiritually pure. We can hold the Gospel in our mouths. Can’t expect a little thing like you to grasp the higher registers. Your mouth is too small.”

“I try, I try to understand the manifest and the invisible. I Devour. I Seek, I Walk.”

“Of course you do, precious thing, of course.” He sidled up to me and pushed his emerald head up under my hand like a cat. “No one blames you. It’s just not how you’re made. White as paper you are—well, what’s paper for but writing on? And the paper knows nothing about it, can’t go about reading itself. Just so, you can’t be asked to know my Gospel any more than the number of my scales. If I had hands I might scribble a bit on you myself. Such sweet skin.” He gestured in a friendly manner with his slick reptilian legs. “You just keep on as you are. Downdowndown. You haven’t found your true Author yet—not like my own radiant self and the radiant Man. There is one that will cover you in ink like a hand. Until then you’re just a river without a bank, rushing and crashing and flooding with no ocean to devour you. To gobble you up. Wish it could be me. If you could touch but the outer rim of the golden meaning of the Man and the Bar, the first layer like a crystal onion, you would be saved. If you could only understand that there is only one Man, and only one Bar, and they walk into each other, and they are the same. These are High Mysteries. But no! No one expects you to be pure like we are, pretty girl. Why, no!” He looked at my hips smugly, his marble eyes preening. “But whether you grip it in your little white hands or not, a Man walked into a Bar, and it was a fine day.”

The Crocodile ambled away, humming a little, slogging through the sparkling pitch with the sun pooling on his back like thick rope.

10

I see.

Shoeless in the cunning morn, under sky’s wet wings, blackness of the huntress-night faded to denim blue, old washed jeans hung out to dry in the rain-scrubbed air, knees torn open to reveal a blaze of dawn. Another day, it goes on and on, ever faster around a dying sun. Things have changed, they never change. Have I never seen another creature, Hare nor Angel nor Man nor Bar in the nevertime of my tenancy here? It is possible, I could not say. Memory is full of back-folds and hidden levers, my origami-crane mind, creased upon itself, blankness crushed into Form. It is equally possible I have seen and spoken and trembled before them a thousandthousandthousand times before. It flows together. I shrug underneath it, the dilated copper of the Road and the Journey re-settles on my muscled shoulders. I accept. If there is a new thing in this place, its newness may be mine. Longago but also tomorrow and Thursdaynext I lost the grasp of solid hand on happenstance.

There is something. It appears suddenly and without golden trumpets. It is not threatening, it does not speak. This is a relief. From the terrible cisterns of memory I excavate a name for this silvershimmer thing I find on the inner curve of a dead-end Wall. Mirror. Copper snakes raven each other around its polished surface, gnashing teeth like guillotines. Asphodel twines through their tangled bodies, pike-branches piercing the thick serpent-flanks. I approach, because it does not move or hiss. Deadwood-drift I on its silvered Sea, azure ether of reflection wreathes my face. And the hieroglyphs of the Angel’s hand which seemed so radiant leaping like enthralled fish under her fingers are now surly and vulgar, wide swaths of grease staining, avenues of gaping black wounds, fury of childish lizard-scribblings biting into body, slime-tracks of some unimaginable worm, foul soup of rotten tempura tearing obscenity from unthinking skin. My flesh her possession she scrawled in wordless barnacled umbilici, each downstroke of pen a penetrating blade, spurt of reeking ink over breasts and belly, navel filled up with grotesque swirl of jet, hair streaked with toad-skins, the snowy peaks of curls hidden in sightless amphibian eyes, paints clattering