Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,43

little more than a maze of empty worm-tunneling. I pitied her so, even through my own ant-farm form.

“Still, you are healthy, old woman,” the Monkey mused calmly. “I can smell the warmth of baking apples in your skin. Why do you not simply give her what she wants so that we may leave you to rot in peace? I can smell it here. She will hunt it out. Hoo. Your story is your own. We cannot take it from you and we do not want it on our backs.” I looked up from her warm knee with a start, at the visage of yet another riddle from the mouth of a primate, another thing I could not understand.

“What do you mean? What is it? What do I want?” He ignored me and the crone chewed long book-strips, avoiding my eyes. He slipped from the jar and trotted over to me, fur rippling in the firelight.

“Darlinggreen, I know you are angry with me because of the chess pieces, and because I am such a sealed box where you believe treasures and secrets are hidden away. But do not think that just because there is a friendly fire and a ceiling, because there are books here that we are not still within the Labyrinth. That a house is an escape.”

At this, the woman cleared her moldering throat unfolded her limbs like creaky shutters and rose from her chair.

“Would you like some tea, girl? I have some nice willowbark tea somewhere . . . ” She rummaged in her jars, profile caught by the palest of slanting lights entering a round window near the birchwood rafters with their garrison of black-beaked crows. She put the kettle on for tea in the half light of a hut filled suddenly with long shadows of the hearth and of dawn, filling the little tin vessel.

I watched her drawing water, most domestic and ancient of tasks. Draw water from the well, and the moon from the sky. Corn from the earth and a child from the womb. (Wise woman, wise woman, do these things with your strong brown hands.) The hut-which-is-the-world is washed in blue kitchenlight, in the small, smaller, smallest morning. There are no possible others, just us beneath the kettle-steam spiraling towards the ceiling like the trajectory of a strangely-fletched arrow shot above the burnished pot, a little copper sun growing red on the stove. And the tea-leaves where she will divine the only face of her beloved endlessly repeated in the blue, blue light.

As the water bubbled and she made tinkling domestic noises with mugs, I heard her mumbling like an incantation: “This is my house. This is my bed. That is my wine-glass which does not drain, that is my fruit-bowl. I have put those violet flowers in their vase, I have set the saki-cups and the tea-cups and the flour-cups on the table, I have cleaned the mirrors. I have swept the threshold and the closet-floor. I have tended the Library. This is my house, where I have cleared a space for my sickness to curl up like a cat. I am half-sick of shadows—I won’t give it to her, I won’t.”

This last was underscored by the dreaming trickle of brew into a goblet, and her shuffling bare feet moving back to the fire. She sets one clay cup before me, shooting a gruff look at the Monkey, and kept the other for herself, collapsing back into her enormous chair/throne with relief.

“You get none,” she clucked, “because you are a nasty little Beast who talks when he shouldn’t.” I drank, and it was bitter. Piquant leaves and rainy soil, the tang of acorn mash and copper filings.

With his large eyes like equatorial bats, the Monkey looked up into mine. “Look at these Walls, look at the Path from kitchen to fire, look around at the Doors and the Creature in her chair. Hoo, darling, it is the Maze writ small, yet and still holding you within. This is not your home, you cannot stay.”

“But I am so tired, I want to sleep, I want to stay. I could get better if I slept.”

The crone nodded over her pulpy supper. “Let the girl stay if she wants to, I have plenty of room. But it will not help you to sleep. I have slept and slept, until I could not dream, but it is no balm, it does not heal. You came here because you are sick and this is a plague house,