Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,60

now but you and Alone, not even a body, which long ago hushed itself into the snow-storms. It is completed, your magnum opus. A fontanel has re-appeared at the crown of your head, pulsing gold and silver—you are an infant again in the arms of the empty air.)

I have been alone for a long time.

Fish Swim Upstream, Breaking the Ice with Their Backs

The dream-pagoda has five floors. It is red like dripping wax and in my cloud-body I have not climbed to the top. I think I meant to, once, but the cycles of fat salmon spawning took my smooth limbs and left juniper twigs. I huddle, or she does, the dream-Ayako, on the first level, against a wall that was once lacquered green and blue.

I cannot tell if it is me curled on the damp earth. The gray spider perched on her dusty wall seems equally myself. I apologize, it is what happens when the loneliness is built up and frescoed in costly paints. Solitude becomes populated with a legion of selves, each laid on each like stacked frames of film, like pig’s ears in the noontime market, or the floors of a pagoda that once was red. The original is lost, just one of a thousand thousand silvern copies, scattered upwind.

Laying over the dream-tower is the dream-wall. It is brown, glum-grained and jaundiced by a Sun which frowns under her straw hat. Dream-men pressed the earth together to build it, and now it is my Nest. In this copy, which is not Ayako but comes from her like a long braid which begins at her crown, I can feel the bristle of fur like a bronze brush on my thighs, the jut of morphine-wings on my back. It is the dream of the lion-haunches, which is familiar as a shoe.

A Boy comes to the dream-wall. He is smooth and brown as an almond tree, with wide-set eyes and a cruel mouth. His hips sing of palm-oiled pleasures and I like him in a moment, because his beauty touches me like a hand. My paws are deep-padded and hungry—I breathe his smell in sheaves, smell of cinnamon and burned bread. My belly yearns for him, knows he is meant for me, will swell inside me like a black apple. I am certain of him, of how he will feel inside me, how his sweat will taste.

But he is waiting for me, and I oblige, for the dream-body knows the thing for which it is intended. Riddles, and games, and adulation.

“What is my name?” I ask in a voice like the sound of the Mountain gnawing his knees. The Boy looks at me with a quixotic raise of his brows.

“That is not a very good riddle,” he replies, and I let his voice slide through me like spiced honey. He is worried, now, for he must suspect that he cannot possibly guess the answer among the possible answers that spread out in his brain like a Euclidean plane. When he attempts it, I can hear his tongue thicken in his mouth.

“You are named Truth, for only Truth can loose what is bound.”

And it is a good answer, better than most can dredge from themselves, pulling their words up like wooden well-buckets. My belly exults.

“No, beautiful boy, dream-within-dream. I am called She. She who travels when the snow flies fast. She who devours with woolen teeth. She who asks. I am all possible shes. There is no other She born under any mockery of a moon. I am the she-Wolf, the she-Axe, the she-Belly. I am the destination of that which is He. I cannot be guessed, and I am never known.”

And then the dream-boy was inside me, in my throat and in my lion’s stomach, whose ulcerated walls pulse in time to the flooding of rivers. My teeth drank him, and I slept in the corpulent sun.

Woman rises out of no-woman, and Ayako stirs in her sleep.

River Otters Sacrifice Fish

Metamorphosis. It is a long line of bellies, chained together flesh-wise, circling each other in a blood-black smear. The sparrows pick cold red berries from the mud, the hawks pluck the sparrows from the sky. The fish swallow grasshoppers, the otters gulp down the fish. The world eats and eats and eats, and stomach to stomach it embraces itself. Hawk is Berry, Otter is Grasshopper. Woman is Fish and Sparrow.

Ayako sees this as she watches the new sun tiptoe on the river. She understands it, for she, too, has a belly