Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,23

Brave. And we go out onto the Road to steal and Devour. Numinous, rapacious creatures are we, and when we stamp the moon quakes.”

His tail wafted like a kite on the breeze, weaving into a figure-eight. “But now, by the sun and the fabled shores of the Gitche Gumee, it is time for tea. Boil the water, dear, whilst I go and hunt for the well-known and elusive beast, the ferocious butter-backed cucumber sandwich. Hoo!”

He scampered off, disappearing behind a low gorse bush, yellow on yellow, smooth butter of fur and flower. It is all falling apart, leaving me to strike the fire in the shelter of an overhanging Wall, crushing nettles and dried roses from the Hare’s Garden into a mild tea, pouring like a wife into my little clay pot, waiting for the returning pads of little golden feet.

I was saddled suddenly with a Companion and a Quest, and the witch’s brew bubble of pale green in my hands. I knew now how far I had slipped since I lay helpless beneath the Angel’s potent form, how close her white fingers lay to my heart, how much more quickly it beat now, now that the hooded beauty of nihilist ideation, the certainty of emptiness, the comfort of a Search without End was slowly being stretched by red-faced inquisitors, limbs pulled like taffy, plucked like harp strings. My head fills with the whipping birch-switches of that music, my arms and legs strummed roughly, that old E minor chord over and over. I can smell the simmer of the oil, molten bronze waiting for them to dip my body like an altar candle, to raise up boils and blisters like love-bites, fill my mouth with a liquid scream, gurgle of churning gold coating tooth and tongue. I will not confess, recalcitrant I, that all I have known is false, and that this Monkey is the master of all. I will not confess that I am a child and must be taught as though I sat at a little desk with a ruler and fat pink eraser, the smell of chalk in my nose (and yet where does this image come from, the twin-braided child with a heart-shaped face, staring into the wild nirvana of a blank green board?)

I will not confess, and whatever this is that grows inside me like a tumor shows me with boyish pride the rack and the thumbscrews, the eruption of nacreous fingernail and warm spurt of blood over knuckle, the melodious popping of joints on the merry wheel, crackling of bones like a winter fire. It is so beautiful to give in, it whispers, the voice of the Stone in my mind like a gilded priest, so simple and right, to let the welcoming arms of that promised madness enfold you, comfort you, nurse you like your own mother. Bend under the leather-handled whips, back like an ash bow, yield under the hooks and blades, allow us to come inside you and purify your soul.

It is pressing me, the Stone on my chest, the great slab crushing the ribcage of a relapsed witch, splinter of bone like rotted wood. I am losing, slowly, so that I do not even have the strength to resist this temptation, the temptation of Purpose again, floating like a blood blister before me, to resist the lead of the Monkey, the Trickster, drawing me into pursuing myself over a shapeless land. Too weak to stay my own course and continue in the velvet pleasures of Wandering alone and unfettered. I am losing myself, the self that is no other. If I knew my name, I could grip it like the edge of a cliff, drive my teeth into it and never let go. I could keep hold, and not slip. But it is hidden in the Book of the Hammer, and the inquisitors will not let me see. They are preparing a vat of acid, red as withered roses boiled for tea, sour as lime leaves. I can smell it, the mescaline-arsenic, the stabbing scent of metallic greasepaint and twelve-year scotch, and the pitch they will spread over my irisless eyes so that I will not see how they mutilate my breasts with mewling hands. It will have me, in the end, the Stone wide and bright in my mind’s eye like a rotting moon, I will burn in the tincture that even now simmers in whale-skull vats.

Into my reverie bursts the Monkey, turning temple-creature with geometric arms full of