Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,19

have been Assassinated—it is something to see. Nevertheless, I have been waiting for you. I see the wheels in the sky and the shape of approaching. Hoo.” I shut my eyes, heavy-lead-bodied and grinding closed.

“I am weary of all this. I do not wish to listen patiently to your reed-mat ministrations and nod like an ignorant postulant. I must keep moving.”

“Yes, girlbodied thing, and I am going with you. For awhile.”

“You are not welcome.”

“It hardly matters.”

“I will not listen to you.”

“I will not speak.”

“The Doors will catch us both.”

He said nothing. I covered my eyes with my hand. “I don’t care. Come if you wish, Beast. Or stay. There is nothing new, even you.”

I rose, striding towards the Temple steps like a wave. Lost, lost in sequence, in the hagiography of this opaque menagerie, it is, it was, it will be all slipping away. I feel the slide of earth beneath my bare and cyanic feet. The Monkey dove into my Path and planted his limbs like a portcullis. “You must do something before we leave this place.”

Exasperated, I spit words like poison darts. “I do not need you.”

This was predictably ignored. “You must give me the Stone.”

“Why?”

“To demonstrate a Thing. You do not want it anyway, you ran from the Angel like a river from the mountain.”

How weary can I become before I vanish? I handed over the Stone, because it is what I am supposed to accomplish, what has been written for me to do, what is required to silence him, to further the Road another inch, another mile, another winter clutch of nights like a basket of hissing eggs. Someone asks me a thing and I do it. I am only the object.

And into his little gold mouth it goes, sparking briefly with light glinting off his unsettling teeth. He smiled at me, a smile of perfect satisfaction.

“See? Nothing changes. I am not consumed with the finding of the Source, the End, the Monster. It was afraid. Now I Have it and it will ferment. It will drive you mad; already you are a little loooony. But without the blessings of madness you will not survive. Hoo. Only the mad can find anything under the sun. Now it has all begun properly, and you cannot escape it.” He rolled his eyes and stuck out his tongue like a party favor.

“Why would you do this to me? I have never hurt you!” I heard my voice as from a distance, wondering tremulously at his green-flecked eyes.

“Another time, Darlingblue. Explanations are a waste compared with the metamorphoses we will find under a thousand spotted leaves. Come, come, come.” His hoo was soft and warm while he took my hand blue as a Map in his leathery paw and half-sings:

“Let us go then, you and I, while the evening is laid out against the sky . . . ”

14

And now we are two.

The Walls wind thickly in long, womanly curves now, covered with a fine thin bead of playing cards and syringes, sweated movement of clubs and hearts, binary black and red, down to the invisible sea. Step for step I am matched by golden feet, slide-swish down the Road at twilight, into the night, into the stars and the black canvases, into the pendulums swinging from a nervous sky, earlobes of clouds belly-heavy with listening. It is not unpleasant, to have company. He does not speak because I have not. Lunacy, if I have opened my veins to its beastlight, surrounds like a nimbus. I can eat the Center, and be whole. It is possible. Temptation has fled in her red shoes and gargoyle petticoats, ravening through a forest primeval, drowned in a sleeping river with the Stone around her neck, to weight her to the sandy bottom. No more the grotesque desire, the terrible Lie of Purpose, the seduction of Meaning. I have wrestled with the Angel and pinned her opaline shoulders to the red, red rock. He took it from me like a tumor and perhaps there is now some hope.

But they are all Lies, even Temptation. They whisper of Reasons, of coming and going, of Time, and of the possibility of a thing that came before. Dread dark bullroaring fear of a beforethis, frog-sounds in the marsh of midnight, dreaming of who I might have been before I Walked. It does not exist within me, my interior is the Mazescape of the Labyrinth, vein to vesicle to womb floating like a rough hewn-raft. I cannot locate