Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,37

never asked for comprehension.

Mask yourself, Ezekiel, with that knowing look, and pretend you can read the scroll. Pretend you know what we are doing. What do you see in the sky? You cannot say because you do not see. I with my irisless eyes swallow the vaulted air under an eyelid. You see nothing. You would sell my bones for katana hilts in some furtive bazaar, my eyes for jewels in heraldic shields, my ears for pincushions, ninepence each. you would hawk my green brocade skin for upholstery, my knees for inkwells, my hair for quills, my lips for slide rules, my breasts for goblets. Abandon me to a thousand hungry Beasts, partitioned and packaged, given away like a bride, devoured and burrowed-within, until I am no more.

(—In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora—)

But the language of the Doors clangs in my swollen head like a busy dockside, I can feel it behind us, the black circle, divining our tracks with a velvet nose. Is it past the Board in the desert now? Has it come past the coffin-body of the Queen? Its strange trilled consonants move over me like diamondback snakes, the rhythmic phrases like the charmer’s straw basket in the musky market, sidewinding somewhere in our shadow. With each pianowire strangle of sentence, a new lacerating chord is strummed in my thick-pooled brain, with each bevelled vowel, brightened under a glass cutter’s knife, finds its mark and pierces me like a gold-fletched arrow, and the Door turns towards the church-bell tone of word striking flesh. In this way I can feel it drawing closer, the heat of its black body like a secret sun.

(—torpor gravis occupat artus: mollia cinguntur tenui praecordia libro—)

Oh, it bears down like a woman giving birth, the pressing, all those massive hands on me, pushing down into the swallowing earth! And among those thousandthousand hands can I not detect a bull’s solid amber hooves? Can I not see ivory horns tossing above me, tips gilded with hemlock? The Minotaur at last, the monstrum lurking, the monster-that-is-not, hunting with powerful thighs my steps like crocus shoots in the spring, the Center of the Labyrinth that I know cannot be stealing along the Road, stalking me as though that Center were I. We circle each other, a fleshy yinyang covered in blood and dust and sapphires crushed like blueberries, seeking each other, spiraling like sumo wrestlers, stamping our fat feet in the sacred salt. And when one of us is perished, gored through like a potter’s wet vase, will not that crusted salt be found on our howling mouth?

(—pes modo tam velox pigris radicibus haeret—)

Black eyed Bull behind me, lowing at the moon, fatal light flickering on his gold nose-ring, his blood shouting with the nearness of our meeting. As though that Center were I, as though I were what he sought, my presence in his belly the very completion of his bovine existence. As though it were not I that sought him, sought the terrible Center of death, as though I were not the Seeker-After, as though I were not aware of his breath smelling of sour mash and clay kilns, as though I were fleeing the inky ripple of muscle and not waiting for his milky teeth on my breast.

(—in frondem crines, in ramos bracchia crescunt—)

And still this hypnotic chanting in the confessional of my ear, the hissing syllables wreathed in smoky incense, the intimacy of his rust-red tongue lapping at my calves, a lover’s searching fingers grasping for me in the dark. These savage incantations meant to bind me still as nightwater or to warn? He is so close now, the wild smell of his mouth is so near. Perhaps I will lay down on this Road, covered in soft leaves how like a bed, perhaps I will lay down and let him slam shut over me, his Bull’s mouth clamp down at last on my emerald humanflesh. Perhaps I will not fight. Perhaps I would be more beautiful Devoured. Perhaps victory means collapsing in mid-stride, knowing the precise moment to give in. It is the fight which comes at the end of a Quest, is it not? Even a Quest-which-is-not. If I do not fight, there is no Quest. Perhaps then I will not. The Compass beats a steady time, a sparrow-waltz, ticking towards the north of my glacial eyes. It wants us Devoured, within that meaty belly; Compass-child Within me Within the Bull-Door, all of us together like a Russian