Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,58

in a paste of crushed diamonds and the hooves of a drowned horse, written with the elegant tip of a black cigarette holder. These have heavy knockers and bulbous knobs, brassy and baronial, in intricate shapes; I have seen a knob like a griffin’s fierce mouth, open in a scream with her tongue made of rose quartz, feathers fanning out magnificently in silver on the face of the Door. And a falcon-claw knocker all of amber, the reptilian talon, the three terrible nails ending in their razor points, all wrapped about with the leather of bondage, the flying trails of a hunter’s bird cascading down the polished Door, ending in a large lacquered ball with which to strike and enter.

But they are not beautiful to me, any longer. They cluster whispering and break and dance in and out of vision. And they hunt. Like sleek foxes they creep along the places where the Wall meets the Road and wait. They will glide up silently and swallow you as you lie beneath a sighing willow, or stalk you through three dozen twists and turns of the Labyrinth, seizing you as you come upon one of the long boulevards. They are savage creatures, and hungry. On what do they open? I have learned only to avoid them, and I could not say. I did not exactly come here, and I will not exactly go. I have always been Here, I have always been about to escape. I have never been arrived, always in transit, slowly digested by the Road with Doors snapping at my heels. I will never tell the tale of:

“One day I woke up and I was here.”

But perhaps it was so, I could not say. Then equally perhaps I shall one day fall asleep and be not here. If this is true, what came before has dissolved from me, lost like milk teeth. But I think, rather, that it has always been as it is, and there was never a beforethis nor will be an afternow. I am accepting. This is not a thing to be solved, or conquered, or destroyed. It is. I am. We are. We conjugate together in darkness, plotting against each other, the Labyrinth to eat me and I to eat it, each to swallow the hard, black opium of the other. We hold orange petals beneath our tongues and seethe. It has always been so. It grinds against me and I bite into its skin.

I accept. It is not always unpleasant under this particular cubic yardage of sky. I once (will? never?) thought in miles and leagues, counting my measured footsteps with my abacus-lips. I once chanted the low, quiet black magic of numbers and distance, of meters and kilometers like coiled snakes in baskets. I wrote over my whole body with sap, calculating how many times my feet had abused the earth, how many times the stones had gnawed my toes. No more, I have forgotten numbers. I washed the sap in a marble fountain of a serpent-woman spewing clear water from her gaping mouth, that despairing cavern. And I walked on, my pack secure on squared shoulders. I accept.

I am not exactly alone. There are Others. Of course there are the Doors, and they are company of a brutal sort, but I glimpse now and again a flash of golden fur or tinfoil tail in a stream. And I hear rustling in the nights that is not the sibilant gliding of an impending Door. I could not say what creeps and whispers through the branches and down the threaded Road, but I hear it, and I am not afraid.

I am the Seeker-After. I am the Dragon and the Damsel, I am the Castle and the Dungeon, the Mad and the Madness. I am the Man and the Bar, I am the Sword and the Flesh. I am the Player and the Game.

I am the Walker and the Maze.

YUME NO HON:

THE BOOK

OF DREAMS

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The chapter headings are taken from the Japanese calendar of the Heian period, which are in turn adapted from the Chinese calendar, which is made up of 72 divisions.

The chapter “Rotted Weeds Metamorphose Into Fireflies” is in part adapted from the Enuma Elish, a Babylonian creation myth.

The world of dew

Is the world of dew

And yet, and yet—

—Issa

The East Wind Melts the Ice

Put a truce to any thoughts of departure. I am she who glides through the sky when the snow is falling fast, the lady of frost and darkness.