Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,20

it among the branching capillaries and smoky pneuma, I do not believe it is there. But I could not say. I cannot say anything anymore. Once there was no new thing in the Labyrinth, and I thought I understood. I survived. I cannot say anything anymore. I am not quite myself, not quite another. I draw the stars down upon my head with a sickle blade. I think he is right, that I am going mad. I do not fear it (hoo) but I think it is just behind me, on fox paws, printing patterns of circlescirclescircles on the dust of the Road.

What do you see?

Oh, what do you see but the salamander’s back splayed out against the sky, the fire-lizard caught in a frieze of Death, the silhouette of scorpion and desert? I see nothing, it is all black, no turns, no hiding places, no Doors with handles of gold. No cloudwalls drifting across the hooded moon, her mask of wax and spittle of cicadas, her ululations, her hair of whistling bats. Wholeness, unbroken, clay pot filled with jasmine tea, warbling in its earthen goblet, satori-sky of blossom and grass harp. When I was in my darkbody how beautiful I was, how singular, how like this perfect expanse of charcoal smeared across half of all, how hidden and cohesive was I in my sweet-smelling nightskin.

We walk and walk and walk and there is no end. He chatters on, and I cease to hear, the voices within bubbling in my kettle-body. Cycling stains, marks of wood-stamps on my skin forced to open and receive, wedged open with an ash spear, my entire form slashed and drinking. And yet—

What do you see?

Wisps of logic, penetrating like armies with furred hats and shaggy horses when the world had ordered itself without. We build our Walls high as—

(—the topless towers of Ilium)

We push our shield-line against theirs—bronze on bronze,

(—And will I combat)

Gates bruising the clouds—

(—come, give me my soul again, here I will dwell)

Our arrows pierce horse-hide and fire-mail—

(—yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel)

Our horses gnash with teeth like tearing steel—we do not want it here—

(—I will be Paris, for love of thee)

And the fire, how high the fire on the turrets, devouring—

(—Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter)

The dissonance, the half-knowns, I cannot, I cannot. I hold my head as though a Monster (the minotaur tossing his horns at my skull) were going to burst from my hairline.

Oh, for the blackness, the smooth and cool hand of that dark heaven on my face, I cannot disembodied drift deadwood between knowing and unknowing, I am being torn by hooks—in the gills of my seabody, the salmon silver gills breathing an air-that-is-not, slits in my flesh like gulping vaginas, vagina dentata and the masked knife, rifts and breaches, continental drift splitting my tectonic bones, pullingpulling apart, whispering intimations the voice within, hinting and grasping. Intimate, grave, the song, a frazzled beard brushing my cheek, and down I go into this pool of sick, this avenue of buoyant retch, heaving waves of bottlenecks and Chinese dinners, aluminum siding and bile-soured wine, bread crusts and fish tails and fulminating bananas, ox hearts and newspaper hats and diner menus, sheet music, guitar strings strangling plucked chickens, watery blood and pulp of novellas, hat-rims and shattered upholstery, shoe-heels and shoehorns and turkey livers, tomcats with semen-sticky red fur nosing in this vile flood of me through the Center of the Road, column of vomit floe of madness and dis-ease down those smug cobblestones.

The Monkey, oh, he looks at me with pity crinkling those black flickering green eyes.

(—And none but thou shalt be my paramour)

The sounds of that sibilant pentameter, those lisping lips worming over my throat, flickering screams of lizard-fire and the paradisiacal yammering of truetruetrue! His pity is a hammer splitting my skull, silver knob bursting through a firework display of blood and bone, spurting upwards, cerebral ejaculate, bang crash of fontanel puckering and blowing high as a whale’s spume. The brain exposed, that Labyrinth of twisting pink flesh, wrinkled as an old man’s belly, and it is really all belly, all gut, the depth from which it rises, madness and sublimity, from the Center, from the Devouring-Place, from the primordial swimming cauldron of murky stew-self.

I claw at the Road, ripping my fingernails and chipping teeth. I have fallen, downdowndowndowndown. The Monkey moves his long brown fingers over my forehead in a tender circling motion, calming, consoling, cooling the fever blistering the peaceful azure sky of