Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,147

seraphic needles. She will not forgive me, she will not believe me. Her navel spoke to me while her eyes shut my face from the room. It hissed that I was poisoned, poisoned by the Lake, and that I would never be pure enough for the cup to pass to me, I would never be clean of that witch. It hissed like a white serpent and called me damned, and my eyes bled for her, the stigmata of the ruined man.

With my hands in her black hair I screamed the heron-hymns of my youth into her mouth, and she was afraid of me then. She wept and her tears burned constellations into my cheeks, and I’m sorry, I never knew, I didn’t know, my love, my love, I thought it was you. But the queen wouldn’t listen, she wouldn’t forget. And now I am losing her, my Guenevere, I am losing her face in the multitude of faces, and her black eyes bleed into my mother’s, and the other one, the one who was not Guenevere, but wore her skin like a dress.

I fell so far, so far. She spat on my hands, and my bones broke like a gate in the wind, and the moon rolled out of my mouth.

Terce—The Psalm of Metamorphosis

It was not only that a hole opened in the world or that in the hole was a garden in which I was the eaten fruit, it was not only that I reached out for a woman and drew back a burned hand. Perhaps I could never have done anything else, and it was all meant to happen as it did, and I was meant to circumnavigate this desert and no other, and pray only to the skulls of buffalo and hare.

I was never innocent, I confess it, as freely as my asthmatic brain will allow. I was a verb, white as opium smoke. I acted, I never stood still. I was the thrust and cry. Somewhere along the way a thing snapped or bent in me and now I can feel my organs expanding like novae, galaxies of liver and spleen, nebulae of bile, of cilia, of obliterated marrow, pounding pulse-rate signals into the blackness of my vast interior—vast enough, anyway, to contain the tumescent moons that spin through me like plates.

But if the geometry of my lover changed underneath me, it did not stop the motion of my hips grinding into her, it did not lessen the red marks of my teeth on her shoulder. The Euclidean planes of her face shifted like glaciers, and her eyes snapped from black to blue. I am guilty, it matters not if I thought that it was the body of Guenevere I loved—it was my fault. I did not die to escape that bed.

But I was not innocent, though I came to that thorn-bed hoarse with faith. I saw it, I saw her lips swell and crack the skein of Guenevere, I saw the Elaine-fruit break its pod, I saw her shiver and her hair flay itself, black slitting to reveal red. I saw it and I did not stop, but I screamed, how I screamed as I felt myself caught inside her, caught as if on a nail in her womb, screaming as I shattered over her body, the glass of my bones pricking her nipples, and her mouth was a trumpet-blare, and the color of its triumph was red, red, red.

The light sluiced from my skin, and her sternum sang my dirge, it gaped between her breasts and I called out her name, her true name which was Elaine, not the white but the clay. I called out her name and her name was the word and the word was the grail and the grail was her womb and my heart cracked like a rotted apple and I was dead in her, I was dead but my son was alive and I could see his face in her belly like the Shroud of Turin and I was lost in the maze of her breath, her wet mouth, her lily-sweat. I was not Theseus, not the hero with the thread of silver, but the mute and rabid Minotaur, raging against flesh-walls and tossing my horns at her phosphorescent ovaries.

Her body seemed to be a cup, and I crushed the goblet to me, and wept into its bowl, and Elaine seemed to smile and promise that she was the only grail I would ever touch, and her mouth