Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,150

sylph beside me was caught in the morning light, I should have killed her. I should have opened her breast before the milk could crack her veins and swell her into a mother. I could have sewn Galahad into my leg and left her a ruin, craggy towers and a vivisected torso. I would have walked with a limp, my thigh slowly becoming round and fat, an egg-thigh, and I this great deformed eagle, lumbering through clouds and the wind-reek of winter. With my moldering beak I could have smoothed the hairs on my leg and whispered to the blue-gilled Galahad, suckling at my sugar-white femur, his little hands opening and closing in the tides of my blood.

And somewhere, somewhere secret, I could have cut open the muscle and spilled out a grail-son onto a nest of sand and pine needles, and hushed his squalls and brought him to the cactus-kings to swear fealty, as I once did, sweating underneath my helmet. And he would have been pure, then, motherless—I could have given him up to the coiled whips of the sun, cauterized his mouth to a thin line, a shadow, an equation.

But I failed him, I let him be born in water and woman, like me, surrounded in that sickening blue, breathing her poison, adoring the sound of her breath. I let him float in the Elaine-lake, where nothing but the detritus of bloated carp can thrive, their coral scales peeling off like pages. I left him to be born in the mud and reeds, a sallow egg, roe, a tadpole—a swamp creature, whatever he becomes. Her fecundity is the rich stink of a dead marsh, and I abandoned him to that false grail, brimming with algae and wet grass.

I am punished, oh, I am punished for it. The sun will not forgive me, it sits on my spine and gnashes its skies. I am not hollow, I cannot be, no matter how I affect this perfect pose, no matter the agave-eyed boys who come to sit at the foot of my pole and stare, playing blackjack on the bedrock, taking bets on when I will fall. I am filled with all this clay, dead loam from a dead river. My heart’s chambers press frantically on a glut of schist and volcanic dust. I am the ash-soldier, blasted against the adobe wall by Vesuvius, who could not forgive, either.

But the desert is full of madmen who have found the grail. It is not impossible to find succor in the clattering embrace of ox-skulls and snake-hides. It is not impossible that I may be able to escape the last of them, the water-wraiths that rise from every well and draw me down into dark and silence, into the death of their lips. They pull a son from me, they pull betrayal, they pull what was pure and pale as a tooth from me—all these things spilling from my mouth like a magic trick, scarves shooting endlessly from a painted gut—cobalt, olive, silver, turquoise, orchid, smoke, ink.

It is not impossible that I may find that cup of sage and sweetgrass, and vanish into grace.

Prime—The Psalm of the Roadside Stand

Apples and cherries, grapes and oranges, peaches, apricots, plums and ears of corn like arrows. The desert has no right to these things, this sugar water bursting at variegated skins. I have no right to them. I dimly recall, when I first came, being disappointed that the Mojave was not empty, was not the wasteland I craved. Black-eyed witches and nicotine-toothed magi chewed tobacco and held out hands full of fruits and jewels—I reeled from them, my skull full of tangerines and white jade, groping for hermitage amid all these unmovable faces.

It was the apples I feared most. Everyone knows that red means poison, means a swollen tongue turning black, means years in a glass coffin. And when I was a boy, my mother’s breasts tasted of apples, her hair like apple-leaves, and under the surface of the Lake, my mouth was always full of the papery sweetness. I put my mouth to her throat and it was like pulling fruit from a branch, huge and red as a heart.

And there they lay, exuding that same earthy smell, in row after row of identical red—I covered my eyes and behind the lids were only ghosts, with their slim arms full of apple-roots. I went into the salt-flats, where the cool flesh of those fruits could not survive, and I ate mice, cracking open