Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,59

I am a ghost, which is not to say I ever lived. I am a memory, which is not to say I ever died. I begin at the moment the ice on the river begins to crack like bones of glass. I am a silence written on pulp-mash paper, in ink drawn from village-wells.

Inward is the only conceivable direction. All arrows point within. So too, this book, which faces down and in, along the sallow thread of my tongue, into darkness and out again.

If I were to tell you that I am an old woman-hermit, who lives on the side of a mountain I cannot name in the year of the ascension of Taira Kiyomori, this would be true. It would, of course, be as true to say I stood outside the Theban wall whose mud-bricks are the color of pages and asked riddles with lips of verdigris. It would be as true to say I drove six brown horses around the walls of a burning city, that I gathered my husband in fourteen pieces and knelt in delta-silted river reeds with my arms full of his flesh. It would be as true to say I invented the world last year, from coffee beans and plantain leaves mixed in my veins. We are a body of Contradiction, flesh-full and fleshless.

But perhaps I am just a mad old woman squatting in the wreckage of a pagoda halfway up the mountain, mending my sandals for the seventeenth time and scraping in my bean patch, waiting for the new green shoots to slide out of the earth like stars. Perhaps I am only she, Ayako of One-Name-Only, who each night brews a sour tea of dandelion roots and watches the stars slide out of the sky like bean-shoots. It is possible that I only dream her, her rags and thin hands, her snow-cold calves and breathing eyes. It is possible I have never been anything but her.

If I do not dream her, then these are my hands deep in the soil of the Mountain whose silence booms in her heart as though it were an empty hall. If I do not dream her, then the others are a mist on the wild goose’s wing , the dream of my lion-haunches and terrible teeth.

I wish to be dreaming her, so that I may call these others true.

Larvae Begin to Twitch in Their Cocoons

(To be alone is to work at solitude. It is very difficult, a lifetime’s work, like the building of a temple. The first years are the carving of steps from camphor wood and the bodies of infant cicadas. Desire is still present like a moth—he flits onto your hair, your thigh, your smallest toe. He sits so quietly, small and brown, intricate as leaves. And you are not truly alone, because he is there, slightly furry against your skin, breathing.

The next years are the erection of a great Gate, red as poppy-wine, with guardian statues of jasper and knuckled silver. Now you are learning, you have begun to fashion your solitude with skilled hands, to chisel away at all that is not loneliness, to dwell in seclusion as you would in moon-white larval flesh. Desire has gone, but Need remains, and you look down the path for the shape of any human at all. Soon you begin to dream that they come. Your joints have begun to fuse, to make an utterly separate beauty.

The interior hall comes next, in shadow and rough-cut incense. You had thought yourself a Master already, but in these years like flapping crows you begin to scream, and your screams become the temple bells of perfect bronze, and you clutch their silken ropes, caught in the great work. These are the maddened years, when you have only the strangling Self. You are a pre-suicidal mass. There is no release from it now, and you begin to sow seeds in a little garden, understanding for the first time that there are no endings for you.

After a bushel of winters tied with chewed leather, the roof is laid out, corners dipped in boiling gold, arcing up towards the sky, which has begun to speak to you. You have polished and cut and painted with hawk’s blood the edifice of your solitude, and it shines so under the dead moon.

And you are the icon, the holy relic to be housed. Your bones have calcified into sanctity. You are the created thing, unfathomably apart, clothed in antlers and rain-spouts. There is nothing