Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,164

rapture, I am certain, I am certain. In his entrails primordial I was helpless, and his black blood pooled around me like a sea lapping against a ship whose loss is forgone. But he saw the wisps of my hair and the earnest gleam of my study, even proud—he must have been proud!—to allow me to finish my work, intimate, close.

He extended that elegant snout to me and his nostrils flared sulfurous-sere. I touched it—I touched it with awe, and the warmth of his tympani-heart barreled up beneath me, slamming a sun back and forth between its sixteen ventricles, and I was a part of that violent sway.

And then my face was wet, and the woman with curtaining hair was emptying a copper flask over me, and thin-lipped she dragged me to a veiled door. The Beast was gone, the vision detonated in a splash of algae-ridden water. His belly was sewn up without me, and I could not even find his scent in the murky air. There was no gateless void, there was no endless fall, and on my instruments there remained not one drop of precious blood to tell me its secrets. I stumbled, no better than a drunk bereft of tavern, and the black-haired creature flung me from the door, into the wood and the wold again, with nothing but mewling magpies flitting stupidly ahead of me.

Beast, when you leave me, I am so lost.

Lizards utilize a combination of high heat, fermentation and stomach microbes to break down their food. Dentition is a secondary mechanism, as the fiery interior of their bodies is fully capable of both killing and in some sense cooking their prey. Teeth are used only to crop large pieces of meat for ingestion and subsequent incineration.

The structure of their gastrointestinal system is similar to that of herbivorous mammals including a greatly enlarged, elaborate colon, almost baroque in its labyrinthine design. Seared flesh passes through the small intestine into the large, cup-like anterior colon. The lizard colon contains many folds and partitions which act to slow the passage of flesh, giving increased time to fermentation and cremation while allowing time to work on the ingested foodstuff by the microbial inhabitants of the colon (protozoa, bacteria and nematodes).

The interior of a dragon is a cathedral constantly engulfed in holy flame, and the flesh of the devoured lies within, consumed in that incorruptible holocaust.

The wood is cool and pale; ashes from my night-fire still comb through the air, delicate as sheets of vellum escaped from some celestial library. There is gooseflesh. There are cracked lips. I crouch in the crevice between granite and juniper, and my knees creak—of course they creak. That is the office of an old man’s bones.

It has been weeks since I found even a snapped branch that might tell of the Beast’s passing. I sold all my instruments in that strange and dreaming town, to the perplexed palms of a blacksmith who will surely melt them into slag, and then into horseshoes. Somewhere a horse will clop its way from stable to hall on hooves of golden calipers and brass clockworks. I am all that is left—but I am pure, I am ready for him, I have nothing more to learn—I only ask to be in the presence of that skin-heat, that baleful eye, to in truth be in his orbit, just a small, unassuming moon, content to radiate his verdant light.

In the black-cake soil I illuminate, monk-intent, the text of my Beast, his lymph-canticle, the scripture of his taxonomy. The loam is my bestiary, and he is the only inhabitant of my dust-opus. The curve of his spine is there, the web of his toes. In the mire, his plume is enshrined, his terrible belly is recorded for the rain and the fog to witness. Tales of his ferocity, of his mercy, of his depthless hunger, insatiable, incomprehensible. The folklore of his birth is etched in pinecone and birchbark, the fire-birth of the cosmos, and he a crystalline sphere of ineffable green. I am his lonely scribe, who was once—but who can remember now?—the scribe of that other plumed beast, that other strutting sire at play in his menagerie, galloping among the tigers and serpents and great, graceful deer, the dancing bears and the hoopoe, the salamanders and the crows snapping at the tendons of winter.

I could not bear the noise. The contests of mating, the territorial screech. And in the end, I could not bear the meathouse slaughter, the shanks