Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,3

low, quiet black magic of numbers and distance, of meters and kilometers like coiled snakes in baskets. I wrote over my whole body with sap, calculating how many times my feet had abused the earth, how many times the stones had gnawed my toes. No more, I have forgotten numbers. I washed the sap in a marble fountain of a serpent-woman spewing clear water from her gaping mouth, that despairing cavern. And I walked on, my pack secure on squared shoulders. I accept.

I am not exactly alone. There are Others. Of course there are the Doors, and they are company of a brutal sort, but I glimpse now and again a flash of golden fur or tinfoil tail in a stream. And I hear rustling in the nights that is not the sibilant gliding of an impending Door. I could not say what creeps and whispers through the branches and down the threaded Road, but I hear it, and I am not afraid.

2

I have stripped myself of light.

The Wall-light and the moonlight and the Road-light and the willow-light. I have pulled it down like a pair of blue jeans, scuffed and spattered with paint. Fountainlight and shadowlight and cobblestonelight, roselight and ivylight and dragonflylight, hyacinthlight, applelight, fleshlight and Doorlight. I have pulled it all away, the yarrowlight and Mazelight and fingernaillight and eyelight. Slid off the pirate’s planks of my thighs like a river of nascent rain. Waterlight. Underneath that mummification of light, underneath that other body which was so well-wrought, like Milanese leather over my little scaffold of bone, I have grown a new skin. The color of sun-heated coffee skimming the cream off of my shoulders, perforated with cinnamon and licorice, tinted with wind-etched Sea-pebbles. It sloughs down over my arms and elbows, creasing itself like the thick folds of a marble toga. The heat causes ripples; it is not yet accustomed to my frame. We shiver and slithe around each other, combining slowly, slowly.

It is not quite like a molting, for I am not quite like (but not quite unlike) a snake; more the regeneration of a limb by a desert creature, tongue lapping in and out. There was the setting of the sun red on red on red, and the sky scalding, and the new skin over my fingers like petroglyphic gloves. Sand caked my hair into long sheaves, curling sticks of stiff driftwood, frozen fleshy-fat river eels. I am a stone Medusa sitting by the Wall, late afternoon light nosing her face like a curious wolf, knifing the supper-meat savagely, turning a pitiful hare and wild greens to jasper and sodalite. And all around her form the crackle and hiss of new skin, growing, growing, growing, covering her serpent-hair with that fabled horse-flesh. And now I walk in a body of darkness that is light, skin seething black, seeking the next sinuous trine of this Path.

I stand as I have stood a meaningless number of times on one of the long thoroughfares, lined with wild pear trees alternating whitethorn and prairie grasses, blooming as though they were planted with some purpose, to shade the heat chattering off this Road, pushing into the air with oily hands, tracing a finger-pattern into the image I see. (Though it may not be real, the Void of the Labyrinth has no shape, and thus no constancy). I have come through a considerable snarl, and the new body I have won does not make it easier; I cannot see my legs move beneath me, they blend so into the liquid night and shadow, swallowing stars into my knee pits.

When I bend to examine the Path, nebulae are crushed to glittering dust beneath thigh on the anvil of calf. It went: left left right straight left right circle back right straight through the portcullis and under the bridges three sharp lefts two gradual rights through the roundabout over the creek and seventy perpendicular left turns spiraling inward.

But it has all changed by now, of course, so that map does little good. And it means nothing, to say that I have come through a snarl or found a thoroughfare. I catch myself thinking in the old ways of distance and arrival, of a goal, of a center, of an end. And even then thinking in the ways of time and linear movement. But there are infinite tangles and straight Roads; that I have traversed one (of a multitude my feet have enumerated into meaninglessness) and spilled out in my dark puddle of