Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,138

Queen looked curiously at the flow of blood nosing her slippers like an affectionate hound. Her eyes strayed softly to a knight, a fearful falcon seeking the hunter’s arm. The king laughed too loudly and drank his mead through pale knuckles as though it would save his life.

I lay on that floor cut in two, my own conjoined twin, enwombed and devoured, flooding into my internal seas. I felt the room become the board, the fates of the pieces shifting as the check and escape rippled into clarity. I felt the boy’s heart connect to mine.

The separation, the ripping of my heart from my head, was so peculiar—calm spread in me like the tide through salted sand, and as though I called to it through tin cans connected by string, I whispered to my body. The colossus turned, breastplate bristling with mistletoe and strangled oak, groping the silence for purchase. I called quietly to its sinews, familiar as old harp-strings, and I blindly gripped myself by the hair.

Nestled in my arm, I looked at that boy, gone white as whalebone, and said: Next year in the Chapel, Gawain, next year in Jerusalem, next year in the Christmastide when the stars flash red and green, next year in my castle where the apple-maid has been.

A bet is a bet—I shall be here when he comes.

White Queen to Queen’s Bishop Five.

My wife has no name. She does not come to the Chapel, but lies naked as a lion and turns the sun to dust settling on her gold haunches. Is she the monster I keep in my house? Her lips part and show an endless forest. Did I bring her here, once? Or did she spring from Hautdesert like a water-choked cactus, putting forth her necromancer-flowers?

I think I am inside her all the time.

Even now, even then, in the court with the thousand candles, all around me I saw the walls of her body, slick and butter-warm. In the Chapel, where the altarcloth chants the vespers prayers in a voice dredged from the silt of the sea, I taste her flesh on my tongue like a communion wafer, and this is her body, unbroken for my worship, and this is her blood, poured out for my exaltation. I am a body of her body, and in her deafening heart I am transubstantiated, I become verdant, I become the deepened earth.

When my axe split my cordwood throat, I felt only her tightening around me, her breath wavering in my vision as though I watched the boy through a shroud of heat. I felt her hands on my stomach even when my head’s wet veins grasped uselessly at the glassy floor. I wonder if I have ever walked outside the tower of her skin, if I ever really let myself go down beneath the knight’s blue scythe. Perhaps I only curl within her and dream, a fetus suckling at her sugar-womb.

Sometimes she looks both north and south. Her northern face is a clutch of stones, slate rasping against granite. This face wears a cowl of nettles, and gnashes black flax with its teeth. From its cracked lips a sallow thread issues like a tongue; where it touches my flesh, I flush green and holly cracks open my pores. Her saliva turns my skin to soil—calendulas sprout in my knee-bones, chrysanthemums fulminate in my mouth until all I can taste is their obscene red. Ivy pierces my septum, stalks filling my body with chlorophyll, shooting through capillaries, thorns sprout from my chest, roots from my thighs—I gag, I spit, I retch in the midst of all this green.

Her southern face is a white river. This face wears a cowl of hair like light, smelling of sage and thistle, the first gold an arthritic miner wrestled from a Californian hill. From its polished lips a thick rope spirals out—silk that was once a worm—and when it grazes my eyes like the pelt of a deer, the pupils flush with blood and smoke. She touches the leaves of my beard and calls it good, she tells me I frighten her, and her skin warms under my blooming hands. My fingers go through her as through a tidepool, and when I draw back, anemones suckle at my palms, blue as kisses. With my hands in her watery hair I am exalted, I am greened and imparadised, I am the Edenic monster.

But I fear her other face, the hag who haunts the dust of a hundred corners.

White Queen to