Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,53

airy and full-lipped, surrounded by her throne of flapping fish? I cannot compel her, ever, so full of every Compass ever minted, and I with only my chubby-cheeked one, so pitiful in my belly, shrunk into a corner of acidic solace,

(—And never moved she from before my face,

Nay, rather did impede so much my way—)

all quivering magnets and wild needles cutting. I cannot excavate from her womb the fluid of a grimacing umbilicus to heal myself, I cannot put up scaffolding over her snowbody and chip her down to the size of a pill I can swallow and become. I cannot even open her docile Door, her little lapdoor, pink-tongued and eager. I cannot

(—Thou art my master, and my author thou,

Thou art alone the one from whom I took—)

for will I once in the cloistered cobbledstones be hers again, to write on, to be carved, to be marked by her terrible black tongue, to be her shuddering paper? I have no long yellow teeth to show like crescents suns, how without a Monkey by to scream and gnash, will I keep her from scrawling over me againagainagain?

But the Door, (did the Door and swifter than I) the Door waiting for its answer, its correct walk-on-three-legs-in-the-evening magic words, the sibilant slip of a Key into its body.

And though its body is smooth and coherent, perfect polygon of gleam, mine is not, battered and meringued I, with pores like chasms burned there by my claws and ragged voice and I have always lain open as a book, read and skimmed and coffee-spilled, left spine akimbo. Because of the ease of sliding a Key between arm and rim, between the ulna and the radius bones, between the socket joints of my legs. Because I can be pried open like a window.

(—Behold the beast, for which I have turned back;

Do thou protect me from her—)

And so if the Maze has twisted in me, bone-Key hair-Key meat-key opening my chameleonbody to it and all its fingers and all its mouths and all its teeth, so may I twist in myself, (all things ending in the body) and open the Maze.

I took the Key in a shimmering hand, caught into fire by the afternoon sun, netted into a sphinx’s paw by shafts of pikelight. Well wrought the delicate shell, serrated edge of claw forming the Key ridges, where it would fit and swivel. The Door seemed to hold its breath, chest swollen with amphibious lungs full up, peering to see if the correct sequence would be followed, the correct procedure observed, if custom and usualhow would dance as they were used, hand in hand.

Holding it like a blade I stood statuesque, arm outstretched like an orator to deliver scathe and curse.

(—Thee it behooves to take another Road—)

And I plunged, delved, dug, stabbed it deep into the brittle surface, oh and the severing blow of fracture and slither (ininininin!) into the soft place between my coin-breasts, where there is a fine down like a gasp, and oh, the grinding as it chews inward, the molten gold blood sluicing from the sucking wound which is so like a mouth, so like the opening to a jeweled womb, so like an iris. (Ininin!) Rushing blood warms the Keybody, it is deeper than inward and I cannot see for the pain, the pain of opening which is always present at these little penetrations—

(—Forth issued from the sea upon the shore,

Turns to the water perilous and gazes—)

See how soundless, accommodating, finger-crooked, the Door moves open a sliver, not enough to bite and tear, but enough for me to slip inside, like a Key. Its breath winds out like a thread soaked in gasoline, sour, tonguing the skein of air between us, searching for me, for the blood it smells. See it wait, still so patient, expecting that if I will not step I will certainly fall if I bleed just a little more. (Ininin!)

But, oh, oh, see that the blood is not gold any longer, any longer, and how I have side-shifted the spectrum one last (but it is never the last) time, one last chloroform masquerade, one last ball with slippers worn through, one last night on the town under all those lights! I have flashed trans-parent, trans-lucent, cut glass, clear as the rivers of Babylon, and how the sun shines through me as though I were a goblet at the feast! Oh, how the clouds reflect milky in my brow, in my Grecian eyes, my singing foot! Fled color