Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,52

revelation to be had. There is no conceivable end in this place, it goes onandonandon, past the last permutation of a chess game, past the last rose that ever grew. ‘Last’ and ‘End’ are meaningless here, and when you go through the Door you will find nothing more than the Road stretching on, downdowndown, past where you thought it must end. I have played my part for you, within you. Now it is done and I will go back to what dark corners Beasts originate from, and you to the cloistered courtyard that all Maidens find behind the last Door, even if it is not truly the last. But perhaps it is, after all,” his eyes twinkled. “I have been known to lie.”

“There is still so much I do not understand,” I said softly. “I do not even know, truly, who you are.” He threw his skinny arms around my neck and stared into my marble eyes.

“Oh, my darling, I am myself and no other, no other unto the nexus of all possible endings. Look deep enough into my eyes and you will see Roads and Walls extending infinitely, in my pupils lie every twist you have ever walked. I am secretive, I will not give you answers, but there they lie, scattered about like shrapnel.”

I swallowed thickly, seeing in those black pools all the miles upon miles, the spurt of a thousandthousand fountains and the right angles of hedge Walls, and the wide Road, extending its massive Avenue like an artery into the body of the Monkey, knotting and turning and opening onto itself, another thick snake breakfasting on his tail, sautéed and served with tea.

“Good-bye, then, Beast,” I whispered, awed.

“Good-bye, Kore, my Beauty, my Darlinggold.”

“Oh, Ezekiel, what do you see in the sky?”

“Air. Air, all around, like wings.”

He covered my face with his hand briefly, tenderly, and I could smell the wheatfields and fallen autumnal apples on his leathery skin. And then he was gone, vaulting over the Wall in an artful leap, tail disappearing over the wild green.

33

I turned, creaking like a hinge, back to the Door.

So blue, so blue, and I could hear it panting slightly under its veneer of silence, struggling to wait quietly, like a good girl, and fold her hands under her legs. And I stare, into and at, unable to move when at last it comes to it. It seems such a large step, the span between two sparkling feet.

I draw the Key out of my pack where it had lain since the millennia past when the Lobster clattered. And it too had changed, once the indigo of his baroque claw and my impressionist belly, it had shivered into gold like an autumn tree, nearly disappearing into my palm creased like a map of some lost continent. But the surface of the Door lay as smooth as a child’s mouth, no Keyhole marring its oceanic sheen with black.

(—For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say—)

Keen and bright the unmarred surface, and I without a guide to point the way with a finger taking up the sky. The Door seemed to laugh, to shake soundlessly with mirth at this hapless girlthing trying to enter its starry girth. (How am I to do this alone, who avoided the Doors so well and gracefully for year upon day?) How to elude one, simple. How to penetrate a laughing fence, I could not say. I am weak and blurred, contours entering themselves and diffusing like the perfume of the harem, My ignorance like a fat jewel, something I could grip in my hand and turn over, marveling at the workmanship. I am playing that same old four-string chord, stretching my sapling fingers to press down on a neck like I was strangling a goose.

I am old, old, now, no Maiden but that very crone with her diseased bones, her desiccation, her bleeding liver, her cataracts. Full of lack, bursting at the perforated edges with emptiness, pressing, pressing

(—So did my soul, that still was fleeing onward,

Turn itself back to re-behold the pass—)

pressing in like a tourniquet, and it is her blood that gushes wantonly from my body, sick and congealed. I have progressed, the effort is so tiring, so full of weights, hanging on fish hooks from my beaten breasts, pulling the flesh earthward, to entice the worms. How do I open it? Does she lie on the other side, all lithe paleness and un-mad, un-sick, un-weary? Liquid Stone,