Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,42

body for lesions. I cannot even recall how many days we spent under the water-shadows of the fountain, in the grass-pillows of the field, though they seemed then and still seem innumerable. The coughing and retching of the world dissolved into the wind. But the examinations of flesh and sinew continued separate from the taut-skinned drums of pounding plague.

The fear of a flat-palmed hand sounding a low note across my throat flowed on faithfully. It became a game, even after the hottest forked flames of sickness had blown over and what remained was merely the mass graves, the pits with long, mushroom-colored limbs stacked within like the rotting bricks of a misshapen pyramid, the tangled once-gold hair of women like handmaids meant to accompany some monstrous pharaoh into the silver sky and the storm. Hollowed cheeks like jackals echoed loudly in those ashen faces, covered in squares of bravely bright green grass.

Later, when I learned geometry, every angle I measured with my clean plastic protractor seemed to be that of a bruised and broken elbow, the acute angles of riddled bones to haunt all the calculations I ever made.

It was only a game, for him to probe my neck and my arms with tremulous seriousness, as though some latent epidemic lay under my skin, straining to burst the confines of my body. His eyes trickled over me with such earnestness, such tenderness, as though my wretched skin might break. In the rainy sickle-bladed stalks of grass we laughed as softly as the susurring leaves, wrapped ourselves in woolen lengths of silence, watched whisperingly the sky and the trees.

We were young by the sea. The salt and kelp towers, foaming terraces, portcullis of coral and brine. Below the flowered balconies pounded the ineffable blue of the ocean, petals like rose-stained feathers drifting down onto its mirrored surface. The sea bore away the wind of the plague, carried it off into the soft cloud-drifts. The sea scoured us clean, made our skin perfect again. The stairs like a shower of peachstones down to the surf became polished and merry again, bright as brass banisters. The universe of our twinship, our two-ness, the low-population cosmos of our lives seemed slide back into the familiar leather gloves of health and flushed cheeks, of hair streaming in the flapping breeze and laughter like the songs of white pelicans.

Of course I never caught the plague. If I had, perhaps the boy would have stayed with me, feeling that I needed his clinical expertise, his gentle fingers, his eyes boring holes into my uninfected skin. If I had begun to perish beautifully, with a trickle of sparkling ruby blood at the corner of my beestung child’s lips, perhaps he would have waited for me, knowing how I needed his clean fingernails and quiet voice, he would have stayed because he would have known how I loved him. He would have stayed and told me I would live forever even as the blood vessels burst in my rose-leaf eyes.

When he died I tried not to think of his body being the color of mushrooms. I know, know now forever that I passed the terrible knives of plague into him, that every time he touched me he took the disease out of me and into himself, purifying me every time his fingers pushed into my muscles and bones, making me smooth and white and clean, taking all the purpled darknesses that never rose up like tiny volcanoes into his fawn-limbed body, dying of the sickness I never contracted.

But I knew, secretly, that I was a carrier, and bore like infants the black strains of death within me, the only children I would ever have. That I would live forever by virtue of the demons I harbored, and bring affliction like a silent choking seafog to every boy that ever lived. Every boy I loved would cough up a glut of blood onto my white dress and apologize weakly before he collapsed into an ecstatic seizure of death. I knew always that I had killed him, killed him, killed him. I knew. I know.”

27

The woman’s face had become a jagged mountain.

Salted tears coursed from every crack and niche, the secret erosion of her once-beauty and her bitter core.

“I know what I am,” she wept, “myself and no other, tumors blooming in every pore.” I cannot imagine we were a comfort, my blank stare and the Monkey’s accusing indifference. Her tragedy had burrowed into her, and the crone before us was