Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,34

across his straight highways.

“Well, now you’ve done it,” came the reedy voice of the Monkey I had nearly forgotten, hairy arms crossed over his chest. “Do you think you’ve fixed anything?”

I sighed heavily. “I did what they wanted.”

“Of course.” He walked over to the edge of the Board, profile whipped by the Game-movement as by a speeding train. “Do you see what is happening, what you have done? They are Playing their Game, and they will Play as long as they can, every possible Game combination, every conceivable attack and defense. And when they have traced the leaf-Path of every Game that could ever be imagined, it will be over, and they will die. They will Shatter and Splinter and there will be nothing left but a mountain of broken glass. You were right, you carry only Death in your hands, and it is Death you have given them, its tiny seed wrapped in your crimson smile.”

I wanted to feel pain, but there was nothing. They had asked, begged, even traded. If they died it was their fault. I could not pity them, it was not in me, if it had ever been. We all find our Way here, or we do not. It was not my fault.

“Surely there are many combinations,” I said.

“Yes, more than you can hold in your painted head. But it is a finite number, and when they reach it they will die. As they were, they were immortal. They were missing a thing, and you have not given it to them. They can no more Stop now than they could Begin. You put them in motion, and now the motion eats them whole. But they are no more than they were, it is only that they have traded for a different stagnant swamp. The wretches would not be satisfied. Come, Darlingred, this is a graveyard now, with glass headstones, we should not stay to witness. I do not blame you. It hardly matters whether one thing in the whole lives or dies. But I warned you.”

“What did I see?”

“An image, nothing more. Let it be. Oracles show, they do not interpret. If you let it grow in you, it will consume the delicate madness we have woven to lead us to the Angel, and all will be lost. I warned you. Forget the children and the tree, forget it all. There is no possible retrieval of even a single strand of his hair.”

We walked out across the empty desert, with its ghost of Road, and I stared ahead unmoving, falling though I was standing, yielding not to the radiating image of the Queen’s womb, but in the possession, entirely now, of the Stone within his belly, its promise of seizure and deliverance, and the moon like an epitaph in the black sky. I did not see in that half-light that my body had blushed to a deep, rolling green. I did not see the flush of fecundity, the sheen of willow-leaves covering the surface of me like a mosaic.

I walked like a jade statue, over the dunes and Away.

CANTO

THE THREE

21

My fingers curved like ram’s horns, beryl-green and hard.

Osprey-claws, and how the green, green willow branches of my arms do look black in the sallow moon! How sequence like a tumor pure and white multiplies in my throat. How I must swallow it, the thick mushroom flesh, swallow it all. Downdowndown. How that sensual slither of must snake-coils over my larynx, squeezing—how it all goes and I with it, no more than a wicker raft seeping water like cyanide.

I am Death, oh yes, with my pretty green eyes. I can smell it, oozing from my emerald pores, stink of blood and spent semen, mustard-gas and alleys thick with crooked, greasy pink lipstick, the musky scent of headstones slowly sinking into mud, fingernails disintegrating, bile rising in a thousand throats, sparrows with necks broken like slender arrows, rot of trees, rot of splayed limb, rot of stale whiskey in a rusted flask, worms suckling at breasts blooming like corpse-daffodils, the sickly trail of black milk trickling from a molded nipple. What you smell coming from you when you are Death, when you are dying, when you are exiting your own flesh, stage left, stage right, exeunt, exeunt. The left hand and the right fly apart.

The body becomes all things, the stage and the player and the entrance, the foil tipped in poison and the exit pursued by a bear, the return carrying a severed head, my own