Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,167

have made something beautiful, and it is enough. I wonder if I will always need someone else to make me useful? How used to lying in a cedar box in an attic have I become, someone’s once-beloved instrument, a glimmer of metal with a corona, like a Byzantine Madonna? Someone once ran their fingers along me, almost faint with desire, the music in him rushing to bloom into the world. I once carried a universe of possibility. Before potentiality sharpened to a fine edge.

Attics are soft and warm, they do not require my loudness or my weeping notes, they require only my inactivity, so that they can settle dust over me like a lover’s hand. How comforting that once was. But it is only like a lover’s hand, it is not. Softness and gold half-light sing the mind to darkness. And this place, the woven gold of the California desert, is an attic that wraps you in warmth like a chain. It is good to be quiet and think, but it does not quite satisfy the belly. And to be this brazen thing, to make something red, something else must supply the air, or I am silent. You understand, of course. You, too, require another to complete you. Your purpose is unfulfilled by solitude. Alone you are an old man sitting on the pier, drinking bourbon and feeding seagulls. Alone, passing teenagers toss a thoughtless coin into your gray felt hat, half-smile in pity and leave you in the dust of their red leather high heels. But this is not you at all, you are a King and it is the quest that makes you the King-Who-Waits. It is at your feet the salamander sits, showing his glinting emerald loyalty. But sometimes I smell your cigarettes from far away.

I thought of that last night, as my trumpet-voice drank the smoke of cigarettes from quietly disintegrating club-goers, and moved through a woman’s hair with such softness, such an ache, taking a black strand of it tenderly from her mouth. I wanted to show you this thing, this thing that you sacrificed. You desire only the one who finds without seeking, how can I tell you what her hair felt like? How can I give you the serpentlyric I cried out over her dark head?

You stand at the center of all human paths, but you know nothing of us, of me, who you call to yourself like a child, of the woman I touched, how beautiful she was. You don’t know what it is to want, except the one who can find your temple in the forest that is not of trees.

I wish I were that one, that I were innocent enough, and patient enough, and that my hands did not bleed so.

I am not your one.

You play the harp, and your notes are silver and slinkingly soft, all glissando. You call me with this wind harp, call me to the dust of the pilgrimage path through California desert instead of Byzantium. You call me to the rim of crusader’s footprints. But last night, at least, I was the trumpet, and not the kind that is mournful and low. The kind that deafens the harp.

I can’t help that I am too loud. My voice would break the glass of your trees. I am all fortissimo, and I can’t change the need for that thumping clamor beating at the ears. I can’t always be the water and the silence that you inhabit in tortoiselight forever. I’m so sorry, because I want to know, I want to walk where you have passed, and I want to see the chalice shining through the tree-shadows. But you can’t make me into a crusader. This is not my quest, not my question, not my life, not my desire. Not my fault.

Last night I was a hummingbird, and it was a thoughtless jewel of green and pink, existing in between dewmeals. I tasted the thick orange-red lips of bougainvillea like dusky honey, and the jacaranda flowers like pale cold wine. There is so much desert in California, I seize like one starved upon the beauty of a few bright things alive in the dark. It occurs to me that when I write to you of my night metamorphoses, I always tell you about drinking. Perhaps because I associate you with water, and rivers, and seas and rain. My father was afraid of the water, he ran from it, all the way to the desert. But to me, you