Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,187

my brother, I should not speak of our son. He will say he had nothing like a mother, and I do not call him a liar, but we all try, we all try so hard. Sometimes I think it is all our trying that has brought us here, all our struggling and trying that sets up all these tragic scenes.

We grew old—did you notice? I did not. One day I had white hair instead of black and spots in my skin like a leopard. I was suddenly slow, and bowed under a woolen hood. I could not stay with you—I went over the bridge to the other world, the other Camelot that is called Avalon and hell and California. I learned to make orange-cakes, learned to make the rain come.

I learned to look both north and south.

And I tried, once every decade or so, to pull you over the bridge with me, I tried every colorful thing I knew to draw you: I sent my girls out into towers with red armor in their arms, I sent you a dream of a beast with a dragon’s head and a leopard’s skin, I took a boy down into the water not once but twice, just so that you would come after him. But you did not come. I sent my champion all wrapped in leaves and green, in a mask, with an axe. I sent unicorns; I sent giants.

But you would not come. You would not come to me no matter how I lined that bridge with sweets. You loved your wife, more fool you. You loved that place. You thought, I know, that I would always be here when you reached out in the dark to find me.

I suppose you were right.

I have missed you so. Why could you not come into the golden country with me? We would have been happy. There would be now no cold seashore and a widow’s barge. Do not laugh—the blood is too bright in the fog. Yes, I am your widow. I have mourned you all your life.

My brother, why have ye tarried so long from me? Away in the orange groves I once made a rind-golem of you. I piled up the wet, sour peels into something like the shape of you. I was lonely, and it was an easy trick.

I gave it eyes and breath and life and it was golden like you, and sweet like you, and it looked at me with eyes of dusty green leaves and said:

I forgive you.

I forgave the orange, too, and they fell into a pile of lifeless husks, already turning brown at the edges.

Do you see the light in the distance? That is Avalon, which is the underworld, an island in the Pacific where where I have spent my days in apple orchards and mint-fields and orange groves and rose-thickets and glistening lakes. I am your Hades, and you are my spring. I will steal you away to sit on a yew-throne and tell me stories of your knights and how you were so young, once. I will feed you pomegranates and make you a shield of whalebone, and we will chase each other through the forest on knees that do not crack or buckle, and I will be brave, always brave.

It will be wonderful, Arthur, you’ll see, and if I was nothing but a white arm before, I am your sister now, and I love you, and I will wrap you warm in my best samite, and my white arms will carry you home.

It is so bright, the sun on the water, on the lake, on the sea, and the dust-motes are so thick I can hardly see the shore.

STORY NOTES

In an odd turn of synchronicity, I sit down, by a tall window looking out on a Maine bay, to write about my first novel nearly exactly nine years after I began writing it, by another tall window, looking out on another bay, in Rhode Island. It’s pure coincidence that I started writing fiction in New England—a place haunted and possessed by its writers—and now, years down the way, I live and love and write there in a more or less permanent fashion. New England has been good to me. All those wide grey seascapes and sudden snows and endless tiny graveyards, like monuments to tribes of hobgoblins. All those winding, narrow streets and mists and cobblestones. How much like another world. How much like Europe, as seen through Poe’s eye.

How much like