Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,6

sweetgrass and wild lettuce and savory roses—these are enough. Why can you not let it be enough? They are alkaline, syrup-filled, fine as baker’s sugar, and they will coat our throats like warm toffee, like brandy and olive oil, and make us beautiful. The Way escapes you. It will always escape you. Downdowndowndowndown.” She snorted and stroked one long, brown ear. “I am the swift sun-runner. My feet are better than yours. Yet still. Still did the Door and brought me. Now I am here with the roses like buttered artichoke hearts and a girlfooted creature insisting on motion.”

I drew aimlessly in the black soil with a tapered finger. Circles, one after the other, each as starless as the last. Downstrokes like bypass surgeries, heart beating like a bavarian choir. I could stay, I could vomit galaxies into this earth and never burn my throat with light, wearing scalpels like jewelry, wrapping my body in bloody togas, reciting my own eulogy with a mouthful of cat’s eye marbles and agaric mushrooms, arm jutting out awkwardly into the world.

I touched her, her softness and earthlight. She laid her head against me, speaking with a barbed intimacy. “What is the secret you know?” I asked.

“Blue Door it was,” she answered, “covered with stars-nine-pointed. Hiding in the raspberry brambles. It snapped at me, clapped on me just like a farmer’s big hands. It leapt; I was not swift that day. Downdowndown. I don’t run anymore, I am not prey. I wait, and swallow things when they come.” She looked at me with brittle eyes, glittering full of the light of the sun on the violets. She was very big, staring straight at me, our heads level. “Stay with me and eat well. Fall through a hundredhundredhundred Doors with me. There are always roses enough. After awhile, even the falling is gentle.”

By now my fingers were thoroughly tangled in her fur, sepia over onyx, swift over slow. I wanted her warmth within me like the Compass, to devour it and hold it still, to take her peace like a pretty ring. But pretty things are all beyond me.

Disentangling, I gathered up a few fallen petals, and met her limpid eyes through a forest of lashes, gently pulling back, and speaking low.

“I am the Seeker-After, I cannot. I must Go, despite the roses.”

“There is nothing,” the Hare assured me, shrugging her autumn-shaded shoulders. “That is my secret. There is no Way—only the staying still and the quiet. The waiting and the melting of a rose petal on the tongue.”

5

My ankle has swollen apple-huge.

As though I were incubating some warm and throbbing egg between my cuneiform bones, the pinch of white hands gripping me tightly during the anointment of the Styx. Humidity sighs orchids and seasmoke through my hair, the vibration of a string bass on the westerly wind, blowing off the invisible Sea in trailing puffs. The moon like a garlic bulb scenting the sky, throwing out starry pale green shoots, glowing between raindrops.

Here am I laughing like the Hare, my girlfeet pierced with honeyed stigmata. Here am I bright as a dueling pistol in the dawn, hobbled and kept still by strange circles turning beneath the skin of my darkbody. I cover my translucent feet with the hem of my skirt, so as to expose what they contain. that perfect Greek ankle, palpitating for the advent of a Serpent, the auroral revelation of a penetrating arrow. I have swallowed the Road, I have eaten death. Hard, coarse black bread crumbling on the teeth like fallout; warmth like oak-honey clogging the cilia with its liquid sibilance. I am awake, I am asleep, I am a somnambulist who each night presses herself between the Walls, in among tiger-spiders. I eat clay and drink dust beside kings whose names I have forgotten or never knew, because we have both refused the gods and their perfumed eyes. We stare ahead and calculate the burn rates of white dwarf stars to pass the time.

I dwell within this invisible ravage, the scald of temptation. Stay within the white wheat the silver and the star, stay within the Wall and the Garden greaves, folded into a rose like an exhausted bee, gold enfolded in scarlet, and sleep forever with a sugared violet pressed on my tongue like a coin on a corpse’s eye. Oh, but it is beautiful, to sleep and to rest and to walk no more. The radiance of true nothingness set against the glimmer of its threat. It