Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,51

of the Bear we abandoned to his beauty? Should I speak of your visions? Should I preach the Gospel of the Man and the Bar?” He paused like an insect on a leaf. “Should I speak of how I do not wish it, after all this, to be the End?”

“Do you not?” He looked earthward, blushing if a Monkey could blush.

“No. I am accustomed to you now. I should not be surprised. It is always like this, and I am always sad. Hoo. It is the smell of the sky on your shoulders that does it, that roots me to you at the last of all possible moments. Let us try to be quiet. Words spoil everything.”

And so we went, softly and methodically, Monkey dozing off on my shoulder and politely remaining smugly silent. And of course I could not see what was ahead, could not see the terminus, the road sign marking the last detour, could not see its nailed boards and blue shadow until we nearly tripped over it.

“I told you, I told you,” hooted the Monkey, clapping his little hands. “I smelled it miles ago! Humangirl, your nose is a poor servant. The End! The Uttermost End.” He danced a little, though less happily than he once did, when in the delicious throes of proving me wrong.

It was nothing more than a little Door, no higher than my wedding-band waist, arching to a delicate point at its crown, like a Bishop’s miter. Deep blue, was the Door, expanse of India ink, flowing tempura-thick over boards knotted and hewn with a dull axe. Vaporous frescoed stars floated around its rim, edges blurred and fading into the expansive blue, giving each a pale aureole, a vague corona. I felt myself falling into the color, as though it were truly a lake and if touched would ripple outwards from my finger. But there was no knob anywhere on its ornate surface, and it did not leap out or gobble us where we stood. In fact, it had not even been following us. We had stumbled on it quiescent and still, and even now it made no move to seize us.

“Why doesn’t it want us, Ezekiel?” I marveled, slightly disappointed.

“Do you want it?”

“Well, no, of course not, it’s dreadful . . . but . . . I cannot quite say . . . yes, I think I do. It is Not Like the Others.”

“No, my Kore, my love, it is not. It is the Last Door, Your Door, and this is the last day. Not the cream but the last dregs of milk. And I must leave you to it.” He smiled wanly and scratched his elbow.

“You are a slippery little thing. You come when I do not want you and go when you please. You drag me out of the crone’s hut only to leave me here, when I don’t even know how to open a Door I shouldn’t want ajar. I am nearly dead, if my jaundiced skin didn’t advertise it, and you will go and leave this bird’s wing Door as my headstone.”

I wept a little, but it was cursory, the shedding of such valuable tears as my own metallic drops. (Collect them and be a sultan, be a banker, be a thief of forty) I knew it all along. When long, long now before I lay beneath the radiating Angel I was alone with her, in her arms so cold they burned, and it would be so again. I am the Maiden, and when the Maiden faces the Queen it is alone, so no one will see that she thinks the monarch beautiful and worthy of love, even as she seizes what is hers from those white arms.

“Hoo! Darlinggold, if you think you have been carrying a Key all this Way for any other purpose but to open a Door, then you are a silly girl and you do not know how these stories go. It is the Uttermost End. Everything is simple from here on out.” I tried to hide my surprise that he knew of the Lobster’s little Key, which I still had nestled in my pack.

“As for the rest, at the end, you are always alone, it is inevitable. The Maiden goes on, the Beast stays behind and catches tears in his whiskers. But as I have tried to tell you, even this is only an event, not a true end. It is the borderland of a sequence of events, but there is no