Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,47

is always cause for celebration: the village eats for a week. Quick as a spring hare you won’t escape, we know all the best hiding places.

(—Furthest from end then, when they nearest weene

That makes them doubt, their wits be not their owne—)

Oh, ho! Indeed, you are far from salvation, from rescue and release. I am the Path that pierces you, my body gores you like a matador, and how I burn inside you as though you were a censer with all your pretty gold finish. Never think there is anything else but you and I alone in the dark.

Oh you Salome-witch, with the blood of that glass-bellied Queen on your painted fingers, dance here in the Dungeon as you danced in your heathen grove, and we will merely crush your skull with a stone. We will take a sliver of flesh from your dancing heels and plant the wisteria with them, and oh! How purple they shall grow in the spring! Walked you on the desert Road like the shadow of a hawk, but you can never, never escape it, it trails you like squid ink, trails you like a credit report, chases you like wolves after caribou, clings to you like jellyfish. We knew you when you came, we knew the moment your black foot touched Holy Ground. Perhaps we will only drown you, drowning in the Sea will salt the meat, and your lungs will fill up with scrolls before you die, the parchment will choke your cilia, papyrus in your ivory nostrils, (and tell us, tell us how nice the oranges tasted!) Aramaic letters smearing on the Walls of your esophagus; oh, how pure you’ll be! HOLY, CLEAN, PURE, white the color of divinity, and you all stained RED, RED, RED, blackberry juice on pricked fingers, pricked like that famous beauty’s finger, only you weren’t ever a beauty, were you? Oh no, not with that dress, not with those shoes, not with that ratty hair!

Oh, you though you could charm even with that dreadful time-release skin moldering into all sorts of decayed shades, your stupid mewling mouth gibbering with black vomit on your lips, the vomit of your sickness, your unclean brain, cramped and filthy, and yes, oh, yes, precious, aren’t you the Monster after all, deformed and grotesque, commedia dell arte devil with bells for horns, weak but ugly, oh isn’t that you in the proverbial nutshell! Isn’t that JUST PEACHY? Your little piglet haunches all scrunched up in your dank corner picking at the lice eggs of true reality and how they GROW on you like fruit!

Oh don’t cry, little bird, don’t cry. Aren’t you a NICE GIRL after all with your lolling eyes and your mouth full of smoke and your sloppy eye-make up, aren’t you really a NICE GIRL at heart, oh yes, of course, precious, we know, we know.

And we’ll crust you in salt like a diamond dress, how pretty and NICE you’ll be for the feast! All dressed up. With three fingers (for the Trinity, of course) we will scoop the mound of salt from your contorted mouth and remove your teeth to play dice with, and scrape it from your cheeks as though from a fat side of salmon. In the afterglow of your ascension we will dance and dance.

(—That path they take, that beaten seemed most bare—)

Oh, you foolish girl. I am beyond everything that you are. You should not have come, not have come, to the walls of the Labyrinth with its mosaics and cisterns like the vaults of heaven. So becoming with your clear eyes. Yet you could not see the Way. Come and dance for us, Jezebel-witch, Delilah-daemon, show us the calves famed in Gaul and Britannia Ultima, show us the white-armed dervish of the orange groves.

(—This is the wandring wood, this the Errours den—)

This is the end. You know nothing. Do not pretend. You are mine, my very own.

And in my dream, in my sacred madness I see his face how like a stalactite lit by the light of bat’s eyes. The callow face of the Stone, cutting me like an obsidian arrowhead, surgically slicing, glutting himself on me, glowering, gloating. Now that I have chosen sleep he can have me entire.

Oh, but know that I will wake as dreamers do and you will slip back into the white pebble in a macaque-stomach, and I will lurch onwards.

Will you now?

Oh yes. I accept. Here and there, my body is all sweet flesh and curve, ready