Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,14
over me like a kettle of festering squid, eating the white and pale with their horn-beaks, destroying, destroying.
I can see reflected her horrid watercolors seeping into me like poisoned semen, defacing the Walls of my womb with angry graffiti, splatter of mucus-paint and ravening teeth tearing bloody chunks away, like a crumbling Wall, vandalizing my uterine Wall with obscenities drawn in fouled india ink and tongue scrapings, the ravening hawk, the gaping earth. Streaking the mouth with the oil of octopus eyes. For only the eyes remain, horror-blank, the erasure of iris, pure white as rice paper and saki-cups. I wept and screeched with that ruined mouth, owl-rage filled up with razored feathers. Betrayed into monstrosity. Hic monstra delitescunt. Milky tears seeped from my blasted eyes like sap.
(—Dare frame, dare frame thy, Dare clasp—)
Mirror. Threads of voice and fennel like capillaries, invading my mind, refracted words from a beforetime I know has never been. Curse I all things. Mirror-eyes full of reptilian venom, green scales clinking like armor, full of unanswerable ecclesiasts. Despair rises up in its terrible bubbling laugh again as I fall, head full of hammering, onto the calm silver thing, clawing with ragged hands and spouting all-vowel gurgling rivers, my mouth a goblet of ash.
And the Mirror gave way, into tumbling and pale, into watery possession, sleek of covering mercury, perfect wash of purifying silicate, hydrochloric Sea burning slicing pulling skin from bone, ramora nibbling vermin from a great grey arrow of shark-flesh, warm pain flowing clear, fallingfallingfalling.
(—In what distant deeps or skies—)
The rush and foam of that invisible Sea aural licking at starving earlobe, thunder a ceaseless rhythm of time irredeemable, ecstatic Seaweed strangling gleefully, leaping goldfish sparkling into waiting mouths, open icy aquamarine descent through cobalt and midnight, phosphorescent tumbling girlshape in (at last) the Void of sight-without-seeing, in the oceansmith, in the blue, blue forge
(—On what wings dare he aspire—)
benediction of liquid gliding half-intoxicate eternal coffin-wrappings of cerulean manuscripts, the Water Verses. Ear over heel, downdowndowndowndown. Or up. Up or down, I could not say, I could not say. Lime skins cover me like garden snails, suckling gently. Turning and sizzling in the deep, bubbling skin like fiftyfiftythousand cauldrons, jostle of newt-eyes and ox-horns.
(—What dread hand and what dread feet—)
My hand like a white starfish among them, bouncing among the morass, the soupy opiate snowbank enveloping. Something different, not the Road, but the Fall, breathtaking Descent, bauble-perfect and giggling, the Fall surmising the world, surmising the Maze, surmising vandalized I in its blue-black wash. Crushed stuttering onto a silver washboard, strong brown hands pounding into cleanliness, all of us slipping, falling, drowning, throats coated in blue, nothing but blue surrounding in this incubatory downstroke,
(—What the hammer? What the chain—)
filled with turquoise yolk-fluid swimming inside this cyanic egg, swallowing the Sea obediently, fish flopping in the draft of foam. Fast as I can, speeding through indigo waves crested with elephants starry pale, transcendental fedoras filled with meringue
(—when the stars threw down their spears—)
seeing nothing through blank eyes injected with oceanic dye, deep-ening, deepening. I am still I, arms drawn like a bow towards the sun.
Give me the numbers of the moon, the rock-salt tranquility.
I wake with hardness, the bumps and trickles of cobblestone under my ravaged back. It has rained, I can still smell the earthy thickness of rinsed air. Still the Sea lies invisible, but it thumps loudly, much more loudly now in my breaking ears, a piano’s lower registers broken and crushed to ivory paste. Still the Walls rise up, these new manifesting in streaked bloodstone, carved skillfully, not a glimpse of decay anywhere, antiseptic and darkly beautiful, springing up from a Road of polished coral like sunburned titans, draped with wilted windflowers climbing into nothingness.
Desolate circle of stone, with the Sea screaming somewhere unseen. There is a click and clatter behind me, behind me where the Mirror should be but is not, unsurprisingly, blank stone. Just a tunnel, after all that ecstatic ideation, just a passage from one sliver of the Labyrinth to another. How many times have I known it and given it voice but must remind my unlearning self: there is nothing but this.
The clicking repeats, a purposeful morse code of tapping the coral Road and I turn to recognize it, now nearly accustomed to Others and their erstwhile Appearances, and so accompanying my turning with a great, burdened sigh.