Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,171

so beautifully, shimmering slightly before drying. The cuneiform magic of their arch and fall sang through me.

And yet how strange to be vertical, held upright like a heron poised on one leg, maintained in a tall line, the mast of a ship catching wind and expelling storm. How strange to feel inkblood draining out of me, all sensation focused downward as the vellum received my raven-throated exhalations. Horizontal is the direction of dreams, of the otherworld, of sharp-hoofed Time and the eventuality of death. Thus we lie on slabs and mounds of furs, on cots and grasses. We lie and gaze upwards into a sky-mirror, there to see ourselves become fantastic, become legend. Verticality denied me this, I could not cast upward to the sun. I was timeless in the hand of icicle-skin, without present, in motion so slidingly that pause by death or dream was inconceivable.

Is this what you feel, out beyond the breakers, beyond the desert and the stream? You do not move, but are in motion, shaking with it, sylphlike in the water-shadows and reeds? Your tentacles and umbilici snake out over the miles of earth and sand, coils of bodylight snatching at the air to find a remnant of me still gasping in the wind.

I want to shake you, as I have been shaken by you, to see the lake ripple behind your eyes and demand, demand, demand:

“Why are you drawing me?”

My voice is pathetic to my own ears, a whimpering, sheeting tears, child’s wet-nose:

“Why me?”

Why is my figure so circumnavigated in your mind, so realized and defined, drawn as surely as a an angel out of Raphael, shaded and colored by your palette alone? Why am I bound to you?

It isn’t worth anything, protestation. In these metamorphoses how rarely do I have pockets for a few dismal coins, but no lump of copper or silver would make a single cry of negation a thing of substance or meaning. I know it, I know it, I know why this road was built, why it goes forward and not back, what lies at its end.

I am peeled like a raw almond, bright green, down to the pure whiteness of fruit, so that you can take my skinless and shivering form into yourself and make me like you. Purity flows from your hand like a curling vine, and you will have me white or not at all. Purification, purification, scouring the sands of rivers dark and hushed from my arms, pulling the mosaic teeth of ritual crocodiles from my feet streaked with the black mud of the Delta. My body is restful and leaping and rippling like the lake that bore the sword, but it cannot yet birth such a thing.

I hate what you want to make me. You encourage my limbs, seduce them into rigidity, into dissolution, into the silver aurora of a blade, beguile the line of my lips into the twisted gold of a hilt. Or is it the stem of a Cup into which you would have my body form itself? My mouth open to the heavy sky in its silent howl to mold the agate and ivory bowl of the chalice? Are the very fingernails of my hands to comprise the milky jewels of its rim?

Yes, I am angry. I have floated like a barge of lashed birchwood on the fantasy of my Will, and you steal it from me. Every time you smile beneath the curtain of your briar-beard, every time your face goes benevolent and sorrowful my hatred rumbles like a sheet of tin. If I shrink into the corner of a cinnamon-scented café, if I bury my face in a chipped green cup so that the steam will encircle and hide me from you, you appear before me to ask in infinite gentleness if I want another.

If I recede behind a bookcase in the Library, examining the bindings, you materialize to tell me that silence is mandatory in such places. I cannot escape you and I will never forgive you that. Only in the nights, as I flee into shapes and lines not my own do I find respite from your compulsion and sympathy. You see in me some core of purity beneath all that which does not exist. You will allow me no humanity.

Last night I was a a glass of beer. I was foamy and golden, and slender and bitter-earthy. I think I was a microbrew of some kind. I sat on a coaster with a picture of