Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,148

was the only life I could ever drink. It was over, over, over and I had betrayed my queen and I clung to the chalice of her, soaked in tears and blood and semen, and her fingers were laced over her liquid belly where the embryonic diamond had begun to swallow its mother in long draughts, the gilled Galahad-thing which I could not now escape.

What a poor beginning for my son, all dressed up in the methane-blue betrayal of morning and grimacing in the light of my skin which was not the light of revelation. But whosoever drinketh from his mother shall have madness until the end of his days and the desert gaping like a jaw at his left hand. I stumbled from the bed and retched a pool of jaundiced stars into the corner, and Elaine was still as stone, listening to the grail-child unfold inside her like origami.

Compline—The Psalm of the Desert Father

I passed out of the world. I ran out of it. I sought out the driest of lands, those red and ochre, burned white and thirsty. I sought out the sermons of the saguaro and the yucca bell. I went deep into the waterless earth, the Lakeless air—in the yellow silt I broke open my skull, and four black opals spilled onto the rock.

Each held a clemency I could not touch, each whispered of purification and hands cleansed of the imprint of Elaine’s body. Each reflected my face a hundred times, the hundred Lancelot-selves which I came to bury, the watery proliferation of mirrors I could no longer believe would bear my weight. I gathered up the stones in my arms and cradled them like daughters, daughters I never had, daughters with her hair like cats’ pelts, thick with wild scent.

The sun told me a lie, and the lie told me a hymn, and the hymn told me that I belonged to the earth alone. The moon told me a riddle, and the riddle told me a rhyme, and the rhyme told me that only the white sage could heal me, the eating of smoke and darkness. The Mojave opened up to my limbs like a box of secrets, and I went to ground believing in absolution.

The rocks know our story, I do not even have to say our names and they know my sin, they know that there has never been a creature I loved that I did not betray. Oh, but even these red and riotous stones I see through the sick-silvern veil of my mother’s skin. They ripple under her water and I am trying, trying, to empty myself of this liquid horror, to exorcise myself in the heat and bleach-dry bones.

Can I never escape these endless bodies, bodies I have entered like a mendicant, asking only for a shower of coins from their eyes, the lustral basins of their throats in which my poor forehead pressed—can I never escape the bodies I have possessed, the plague of hers which were the objects of my aiming?

I went to the waterless lands and still I saw the shore.

I stood on a pole in the desert, and the afterimage of it flashed forwards and backwards, a pin holding a chain of like-footed martyr-lunatics trying to fit the sun into their mouths. If I stand very, very still, and never come down until the coming of the sea, I will be pure again, the wind will move through me like a hand, it will curl up in the cathedral of my skeleton and sing choruses to itself, it will rest in me and breathe, and breathe, and breathe.

If I let my flesh wither to air, I will not be the sword or the lover-destroyer, I will be the saint of the ways, I will be forgotten and the world will close behind me like a drawn curtain. He will smile at her again, and she will laugh. I am the gray-blue stain between them, and if I go, if I go, if I stand and stand and do not move, it will be as if I never came to that castle between the blessing hills.

It is so clear, the glare of light in the desert, the holy emanations of adobe huts and turquoise ring-traders, the desperate clenching of skin against the sand, the divinatory mesas with their pyre-colors. The red crumble of it, studded with those night-blue stones like a spray of seraphic blood—the jewels which have rolled from the skulls of all the mad