Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,176

from me.

But still, I was born a lie, I was made a secret, and that sort of thing can’t help but leave a mark, like a slap. How could I be anything other than this, hunkered down in the dunes with the scorpions lashing their tails at the moon? A man told his sister he loved her—what of that? Tawdry tragedy, except that a child was all hung with shadows, a child that no one could ever know about, lest it get its fool head knocked out on some unfortunate granite stairs.

I am no one.

I was not supposed to be.

I have no name, either. No one would give me one, for to name a thing means it is real, it exists, it displaces air.

Please, father, look at how I move the air around me. I am right here. Look at me.

III. Earth

Earth comprises distances, great and small;

danger and security; open ground and narrow passes;

the chances of life and death.

This is La Cienega. This is Camlann. There is a river; there is a sea; there is sand and the wend of snakes rattling through the throat-scoured soil. There is stone and a road and light like albumen floating yellow and white. I walk down to the city because I have to, because the light is also a lie, but it lies only about itself, and is holy. I have always been told that light is holy. Even I cannot quite imagine a world where the dark is sacrosanct—I am a mushroom fulminating in shit and decay, but still I acknowledge the sun, though it too lies. It lies and says it is the center of everything, the source of all possible light.

I go into the city because my mother lives there still, and my father will smell her like a deer, and go after her, hoping to find her gracefully bent in the snow, her nose snuffling out acorns under the ice. I know she would never do such a thing; I look for her as she is. This is her place, all full of glamors and illusions and images spinning.

A son told his mother he loved her. What of that? I have heard of a man in Thebes who fucked his mother—he made four children in her, two kings, two beauties, and one of those beauties was an anti-establishment revolution in a twelve-year-old’s body. Certainly this bested the previous score of one shriveled, club-footed boy, marked on that tired womb with a Greek fingernail. I confess I had hoped, too, to best my father, to people the vineyards and humble little rivers with laughing, dark-eyed revolutions. But somewhere in the city’s dark crease she found a lesson learned: no more children hung with shadow, no more lies hung upside down from a weeping woman, umbilicus black and blaming on their little throats.

No more nephews, she said to an apothecary with eyes like spinning wheels, whose counter was greasy with aqua vitae and typical tonics—what otherworld physic does not vend hemlock, belladonna, mandrake? The wheels clicked round—thirty times left, twenty times right, ten times left again, and out of a dry drawer popped her panacea, and though her legs were open to me her body was shut, and she put her hand on my face when I came to her and whispered that a ruin called to a ruin, and what were we both but stones already crumbling, and what did it matter after all, what was any of it but solace, and solace she had, solace thick as clouds.

The other boy breathed heavy and gold. The other boy told her to lie to him.

I love you, she said.

We never spoke of my father when I was young. The universal pronoun. The only possible him. He hung in our house like Cicero’s head, but we never looked, we never spoke of it, how its blood dripped on the tablecloth, spattering the spoons. Instead of a father I had two crows, pets caught out on the moor by young girls with leather cages and horsewhips at their hips. I did not call them Thought and Memory. I called them Gaheris and Agravaine for the brothers who were not brothers, and therefore would not look at me, would not speak to me, but chased the girls with the leather cages and caught them round the throat like thrushes. I called my birds brothers and they cawed in my ears, perched on my bed while I slept, shook their feathers and clacked talons against