Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,170

fingers into the fire to tear off a piece of fish, but the flames burned his thumb and forefinger, and he put them to his mouth to ease the pain.

And then the boy saw why he had been forbidden to do this. For some of the oil of the fish was on him, and when he tasted it he knew in a torrent all the things in the universe, and he understood the voices of the trees, and the river, and the earth covered with dry leaves. He knew the thoughts of his father and his mother and his red-haired brothers. He knew all the things that were and would be, and he knew that he could not now lead the clan.

So the boy went deeper into the forest, further than any of his clan had been. And he was mad for a long time, with these things scorching his mind. But one day the madness passed over him, and he was a pool of standing water with the moon on his back, and he stayed in the forest, finding his fate in the deep-within places.

And your father wept, for you never came again to the village.

Perhaps that salmon was like me, not a salmon, not at home in the fish-skin, a wanderer whose journey to the sea ended in your campfire. I journey to the sea now, that’s where all these forms take me, slowly, against my will which is not strong enough, to you who wait in the forest, on the long pier in seagullight, at the end of the gray and foggy streets of Southern California. Because all these places are the same place, and I know with the certainty of an earnest seeker that the locus of the Grailcastle is nowhere/ cannot be sought, unless one eats the salmon and his insides are lit up by it like a silver-rose lantern.

Last night I was a pen, and it was a sigh of movement. Motion, motion, linear and serene. My consciousness focused in the brass tip, fierce and sharp, devouring the parchment in swoops and whorls of black ink, diving like a seabird, in and out of the golden sea of paper, catching fat fish of verbs and participles in my metallic beak. And swept back, the rest of me flowed like a wave of light, into a long, creamy feather tipped in scarlet, I quivered and vibrated with the shivering motion of writing, illumination, conjugation, culmination of thought, spilled in a rush onto the expanse of page.

I danced with myself: tip, quill, ink, in waltzing time, Viennese in the extreme, the vanilla of silken feather as it crossed highways of finely wrought paper, crescendo, denouement, a box-step of being, tip yielding to the forward motion of statement. I yielded, yielded, to the waxy cold of the scholar’s hand that deftly drove my length, his skin made phosphorescent by moonlight singing in through the iron-crossed window, shifted into cobalt by the stained glass. We swam in blue, were washed in it, purified as though floating in the hand of a river-nymph. The scholar’s lashes fractured the light, casting long, sweeping shadows on the page, blue within black within blue, bars of darkness breaking the expanse of watery light, as though waves blowing forwards and back, whitecaps of my own quick steps through the lines.

It was relief. I did not have to create. The salve of his icy hands on my feather-spine, flowing over me in a blanket of snowy flesh, silencing my voice grown so hoarse with speaking, with screaming over the sea to be heard. He slid me through words, through the alpha and the theta, through the wide forest paths of chi, the violet shadows of omega. He made his letters carefully, small and delicate, dipping me into his little clay pot of ink which swirled around and into me in a rush of glistening darkness, like the Nile through the throat of a crocodile, glutted my mouth with black, with thick, with the absence of light.

It flowed in and out of me with equal ease, in inklight and moonlight, and I could let it because I did not initiate motion, because I was an instrument and not the voice, the ever-sounding voice that could not afford silence for a second, else the world would fail. I could release something nameless and accept the passage of liquid through me, and its pouring of self onto a valley of dry and rasping manuscript. The glyphs formed