Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,172

a mallard flying low over a marsh on it. The marsh was wet with spilled bourbon. I sat for a while the woman who bought me talked to her suitor, laughing synthetically and stroking her swan-cheek with grape-colored fingernails.

I wondered if I could taste myself while she regaled him with tales of her corporate dragon-slaying. If I could taste my own liquidlight, then I would know myself, whether the foreigners I feel was by the brewer’s design. But while I mused on the taste of myself, the woman stopped trying to be seduced and sipped me in silence. I felt the warmth of her throat, the slickness. I sighed into the heat of her body, letting desire pass over me in sunlight and moonlight and grasslight and fishlight, and I did not try to hold it with both hands. Soon I had passed of necessity from the beerself to the glasself, and I rested in my own emptiness, foam clinging to my cupbody. I was transparent, the clarity of my bones was sweet, and I reflected a myriad of eyes, like a crystalline Argus. And for a moment, in this glass in an antediluvian bar, in the hands of a sad and lovely woman whose belly cried inside her I was the grail, open and clear. For a moment which slid away as quickly as a strand of beerfoam, I was no longer my own ever-striving self, but a chalice of blown glass, yawning to encompass the sky and the sea, floating in dolphinlight, I was not a questing knight with tobacco-stained hands, I was you, the king in the forest, and I wept into my own lake, watching the ripples expand into fractal infinity.

And then I was not a glass, or beer, or a lily, or a fish, and the grailight was gone. I was alone in the dark, and even the alcoholic fishermen who dread their children had dragged themselves home. I crumpled in the shade of a brick building, my belly betrayed my grief and I vomited the Pacific into the street, my throat flaming—I was the Chinese boy who drank the sea, and I gave it back and back until no more would come and still my body convulsed in anguish for the moment I could not keep. In fear for my sanity, in fear that I was a hallucinatory Fool with the black dog at my back, who dances in beerlight alone on the cliff edge to the tune of a man who may not/I want not to exist.

And I was ashamed of this so-human act.

Last night I was my father. I looked at my mother from above her body, and I saw, not her face, but the face of another woman, with hair like the spaces between stairs. I did not understand, and when her mouth shifted, red to pink, it became my mother’s mouth, the mouth I knew, and in my father’s skin I cowered, I crawled away from the slick of her belly, and the moon rolled out of my mouth.

Last night I was my father, and I went into the desert. I yearned for the cup, the cup, always the cup, the thing you offer me so easily, that he could never hope to touch. His hands were hung with women—my hands are empty.

You cannot bear any hands which remember other grails. They must be pure, they must have been waiting for you since they first turned brown in the sun. My father died in the desert like a man who stuffed his mouth with peyote, and when he returned, his eyes were full of dead lakes. He patted my head and draped himself over a cross until the chapel stank of his sour sweat and shit. He never spoke to me, not a scrap of scripture or drunken curse for my mother—in both his hands he gave me silence like a black ball of opium.

But last night I squatted in his skin as though it were a sacred hut, I breathed the sage-smoke rolling off of his bones, I drew patterns in the sand which had settled on the roof of his stomach. I put my toes into the water that filled him, and writhed with him under the rain-bringing moon. I was sick with the thickness of him, I asked for nothing but escape, I longed for my salmon-skin—yet I had swum to the stream of my birth, as a salmon must, and the water choked me. I spluttered