Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,17

kind of expert Labyrinth-Woman, I knew its tantrums and its dervishes. And now I tumble like a candle through the night, wax end over end. The Mirror changed me, took me in like a Door, but not a Door, a jeweled tunneling worm. But didn’t the Angel change me before that? I have lost the threads. Memory is masked here, and days dissolve into ripples and smears of movement almost as soon as they pass beyond the moonrise, and so I could not say if I have been eaten by a Mirror before, but I think not.

There are advents and newness stalking me. I could be certain before that the Labyrinth shifts, but it does not change. Yet I am within something else now, a sequence of events, beyond sheer movement, pure and dazzling. It boils all around. the tiny pale blue hairs on my arms bristle like a boar. I am waiting for the portents to come. I feel them cackling around me like a copse of witches.

The carried compass sends out trails of sickness like medieval sunbeams, lassoing organs into green grassfires. The slab of north lacerating my throat, spilled mercury and spoiled stew east roiling in my belly, south-arrow crackling in my bones like kindling. It travels through me as I travel through the Labyrinth, navigating the turns and traps, inhabiting slowly, imprinting the landscape. I have eaten Direction, and it has eaten me. Oh, the yin yang cycles of self upon self, oh zazen clay of form upon shape, oh wheels within wheels within scarlet-flaming wheels. Oh, Ezekiel, what do you see in the glabrous sky, bound with glowing spokes? What is it searing and smoking, scalding the hermetic moon in a boil of stone? What do you see dancing in primate patterns over and over? In this sign thou shalt conquer.

How all we pretty snakes have a taste for our own tails.

CANTO

THE SECOND

13

It has been days upon days and still my eyes are slates.

Crack the egg for the answer, the gold and the white. It lies within like the ascended scrap folded in a fortune cookie, malignant scrawl of notime.

Oh, Ezekiel, what do you see in the sky?

Answer: the Void. The Void and the Stone.

I have stumbled into another layer of within, the sky and its signs are covered by intricacies of stone. This that surrounds—no circular Wall but a great Temple carved into existence in the center of the Road, luxuriating in columns and steps of striated granite, studded with quartz like roused eyes. Exhales into the viscous air like a sleeping dragon. Circus ropes of thick vine lie net-like over the Walls and crumbling balconies, weeping fat tears of wet crimson fruit, which comprises my breakfast in this abandoned place. Sky like a dove’s belly can be seen through vast cracks in the domed ceiling, crusted with flecks of ancient paint like flocks of birds. Copper bells gone to rust litter the floor, fallen in some antediluvian cataclysm. Mosaic with no picture to reveal, (as though any Revelation lies buried and smoking here)the stones of the floor have conquered their polish and lacquer, host to grass and occasional columbine. The wind prophesies in breaths of blades, slicing my inky skin.

In the shadows of the altarstone I chew my fibrous breakfast, savoring the musky juice, beckoning the strange. It is not long in coming. The air is stale, still, except for the Cossack-wind that gallops through on occasional pogroms. Oh, the scrabble and scramble of sequence closing in like hands on a fly. Where am I going, beneath this frenzied sky? Clinging to my knowledge that there is nothing, no Center, am I blind to the wheels of fire? Oh, what do you what do you what do you see in the sky?

I see the corner of the nave move silkily, shadow within shadow, suggestion of gesticulate limbs. I swallow the sliver of fruit on my tongue, peering closer, dreading the next in this idiosyncratic parade, this sequence. This episodic hermitage so full of opiate swans and painted mouths. How will it end, if an end is ever to be contemplated under an infinite train of Bo Trees and crusted snow, skipping projector illuminating this same arboreal testing ground over and over, the ascetic, the pearl, the slanting light? My turquoise fingers are sticky with apple-blood.

It is not long in coming, the breakfast-strangeness. Obligingly a creature darts out of its sanctuary, making for my tiny Bo with determined speed. A handsome golden macaque with