Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,35

pretty severed head trailing cobra-hair and blood of jade, never to be monarch again, Medusa in repose at last. It is the mistaken identity and the lovers united, it is the climax repeated until it is the denouement, the soliloquy of folded hands and pointed toes, act twelve borne on the silver tray of a flat belly. When you are leaving it, how beautiful the platforms and stairs of the body seem, the trick Doors and velvet curtains, the skein painted pastoral and scaffolding of bones, musty costumes hung in the closet on ribcage-rungs, the proscenium arch seems to vault upwards to the damned, the orchestra pit down to the divine. It is all so graceful and well-conceived a creature, so realized a character, fleshed out in all its roles from ingénue to crone, so comfortable a body, so desired, when it is flying away from you like a migratory bird. It is everything, yet I cannot connect to it, I seem to move my legs and hands from a long distance. My sight, unblinking and yawned, remains, the beam of stage-light from blank eyes like grass on a grave.

I want to lean against a tree (a willow, bright and pale, and a boy with the sun in his hair?) and wait for madness and death, pretty sleek hounds worrying my meaty bones between them, gnawing the marrow and howling at the tree-roots. I care for Nothing. Indeed I tend it like a favored rose, nuzzled and cupped a motherly hand around its dark petals, breathed the sharp incense of its exhalations and coaxed them skyward with the ministrations of a patient monk, gardening into eternity with a luminous rake. I pulled out the green shoots of Purpose and Center, held off the marauding winds and ate their fruits, juice dripping from my chin. And now I have lost my charming grail, the woolen Nothingness that warmed me so well.

Am I green now, malachite and woven leaves over rounded shoulders and unpierced heels because of life or death? Because tendrils of red-fruit vines loved my skin, because the wide, furry leaves of violets and spears of rosemary are infatuated with my hair and my knee-caps? Or because mold and decay have dressed me in their ball gown with its plunging neckline, clad my feet in algae-slippers and circled my neck in grave-grass like a string of pearls? I could not say, I could not say. I am so tired, I do not care. And he cannot make me, the golden Beast with stiletto eyes, this little homunculus dogging my steps, snapping at my heels, vomiting words from his long-toothed mouth, vomiting truisms and riddles like tubercular phlegm-blood. He cannot make me, he cannot make me. I am too full of the fat black-palmed baby of my Death to allow him within me, I am too near the coughing morning of its birth. Its teeth join the needles of the Compass, snagging on my womb.

I am within my verdant body as it is within the Labyrinth. We find our Way. The sylph that is “I” is vanishing slowly, a daguerreotype dissolving under a spill of phosphor, image of eyes like stone wells seeping from the page. My body will remain, and the Compass within, magnetized, aborted daughter, but I will be eaten at last by the Labyrinth in a triumphant swallow—I will be a high Wall or a fair-thighed fountain. I will be remade into the flat expanse of the Road, my pointing arm extending into geometric perfection towards the horizon.

And the golden golem Monkey will keep swinging and hooing with his iconic smile, as content to preside over my dissolution as my baptism. As long as he can anoint my colored forehead with oil and announce me to the invisible multitude, corpse or Queen, it matters not. He hates a poor, doomed toy in the desert because it showed me what he would not, because it did not incline its head humbly toward his paw. I hurl my bitterness at his chest like a pistol shot at dawn. Pace off ten steps and fire true.

Ezekiel, Ezekiel, what do you see in the sky? A burning woman, a bullet fired from the mouth of a star, streaming green fire into the sucking earth.

“Darlinggreen,” came his rasping voice like a silver spade in the soil, “You don’t mean that. Hoo.”

22

Oh, I don’t mean anything.

Whether you are here or not matters less than nothing to me. Sun-creature, I never asked you to come.