Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,152

I smelled her skin, which smelled of no other thing but apples, and I felt the water floating again over my face like hands, obscuring the vision of king and ceremony, until only she filled me up, the brush of her rainwater-jewel and her lion-braids hanging low like the tongues of church bells.

And later, when I knew what her mouth tasted like, and the milk of her body, when she had miscarried twin daughters, and when her dresses smelled of us, a miasma of apple and horsehide, I could not stop, I could not breathe unless I was inside her, unless I could wend her hair in my fingers and shriek, hoarse and dry, into her neck.

It has always been so. I am always the little boy climbing into the laps of women too big for me. And I am always surprised when they close over me, and I cannot see the sun for the ripples of their tides.

I climbed into the lap of the desert, too, clambering over loose stones, caked in dust that should have been Aramaic, crusader’s dust, Byzantine at the least. I scrabbled under scrub-brush and hubcaps for the disc of sainthood, the nova to surround my head, the balm for my drowning, and there was nothing. There is nothing in the desert, there is nothing in women, there is no revelation to be gained by swallowing the sun or by pulling on the body of another like a shirt.

Am I cured, then, by the birth of this homunculus, this black little cherub somewhere in my lower intestine? Should there not be a heroic burst of music, fiddles and drums and low, hooting pipes, as befits the geography? Should not the railroad keep the time, the chuffing trains play metronome to the coyote-sopranos?

The moon is almost upside-down. I lay beneath it and it boils my skin white, white as the tail of a starving deer, white as that mange-ridden stag which bumbled into the wedding feast, gobbling the cakes and shitting noisily on the draped dais.

The signs were there, for anyone to see who cared.

When I left Elaine, Galahad-heavy, she saw—she saw, the most perfect of the pronouns that bury me—and Guenevere’s glance was the same as it had been on that long ago day, the day she married, when she watched a poor white deer, its mouth smeared with sugar and honey, stumbled into the feast-hall, start and cry out feebly as it was gashed by a dozen arrows. It crashed through the goblet and plate as it fell, legs spasming, spattering the altar with filth. And she watched, calmly, as they carried out the ruin of that sick beast.

Here, too many years hence to admit, my hands still trained to the shape of her waist, I wait for it to rain. I pray, I keep the liturgy of the wolf spider, I ring out the hours on the bare rocks—I pray for the only promise I have left to show itself—that the Grail will bloom out of the desert like a blood-colored marigold, and that I will be pure enough, just enough, to fall into it and cover my body, this mewling body, the splayed thing, hung head-earthwards on a six-spoked wheel made from the twined legs of three women, this horror, cover its shame with light.

I am not cured. I have learned to speak the dialect of the mad saint, which consists mainly of fire and bone, and printed the lexicon on my ribcage, stamped in perfectly even letters, the typewriter-hammer slamming home each time, expressing the virtue of exactitude. But when the bread and water were carried from Rome, they passed me by, deeper into the desert, towards the pepper-stand woman and the star-pack, and I, in my grubby sandals and mantis-hung beard, could not catch them. Canonization is for those who find God in the desert. I found only the smell of the earth before rain, and the memory of wetness exploding in my chest, the ecstatic drops on my blistered lips, my cracked chin.

The moon rolled over and presented her throat to the stars; the stars closed their mouths over her white fur.

Matins—The Psalm of the Rain

The fruit stands packed up more quickly than I would have thought possible, collapsing into neat heaps like decks of cards. The pole-children scatter like sullen crows. And now it is truly empty here, as I imagined it, the cross-hatch of railroad tracks binding the expanse of land like a corset, the mesas that