Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,63

a dream-husband in the blossoms.

I lay dreaming on the long-haired grass, legs brown and smooth as a sand dune, arched at the knee at the same angle as the tip of the Mountain, as the line that divides the sun-stone from the moon-stone, the shadowed side from the light. My toes wound in the reeds, tiny emerald rings on the dream-darkened skin, set with the diamonds of milky toenails.

See what in what regalia my dreams clothe me! Violets brush the small of my back with lithe, sugary movements. The scald of blue above me like a velvet gown, cut low on the horizon of my breast, clasped with clouds at the shoulders. See how it covers me in veils and layers of silk, rustling against my now-royal thighs with secretive grace, how it moves against me and strokes the skin. And the gnarled intricacy of these roots of a mountain ash for my Crown, jeweled in sap and leaves yellow as papyrus. What sovereignty my dreams supply! I am clothed in sky and bough, crowned in arboreal splendor. I laugh softly, let the wind imbibe my voice, the tonality melt into nothing like the wax of a candle-clock.

Lying so I looked up into the wind-braided branches of the dream-tree, its skin brown as the paint-pigment, the pale green of leaves against profound cerulean, the pink shimmer of flowers glinting like voices. They gleamed in the molten light, bright as blood, bright as the Dog-Star in the deep-blue days of summer to come. And slowly I saw, in the interchange of colors, red, green, brown, blue, white, that two of the blossoms were not blossoms, that their shade was not rose but the familiar olive-gold of his eyes, the dream-husband, staring blankly down from the branch, become the season‘s first fruit, snagged on a splinter of rose-tinged wood. Heavy-lidded, still rimmed in the kohl I mixed with my own fingers in red clay pots until the tips became black as cat’s claws. I tenderly darkened his eyes that past dream-morning when he broke into pieces. I ran my fingertip over the fringe of eyelashes, letting my lips brush the iris as I move from eye to eye.

And now I lie under those eyes, against a tree which may or may not be on Mountain‘s flank, on the banks of the reed-jeweled river. I watch dream-crocodiles warming their bellies in the sun, regarding their mates with a fond reptilian eye.

I dreamed I had no trail to follow, that he left no blood-path. The dream-husband, the dream-brother, left me to scramble after him and clutch his body to me like a penance. I wandered, merely wandered, like a caravan-woman, my hair tied up into a crimson veil to keep the smoke-black length off my back. I did not speak, except to the hawks which flew at my shoulders, and they were silent.

But I also dreamed that beside me ever walks she, the second, or perhaps third self who knows none of this. I wander in her like an echo.

The Skylark Sings

The sun pealed out a hundred bronze bells smattered blue by a bleeding sky.

Standing in the sacred “I” of limbs caught to torso, of alone on a mossy stone with the stars combing my hair. I have smelled the sizzle of my curls. I have clawed and screamed but no one would venture close enough, no one’s arm ever lengthened to cup this body like a grail, and the Mountain gobbled my voice like krill.

They are pathetic, my solitude and my dreams, they are sodden and grotesque, dripping their shame on the summit path, the filigree branches, the gossiping reeds. The river roses tangled in a smear of obscene red as the dawn spilled like milk over the tops of austere trees.

It is Water-Carrying day, when the Ayako-body walks down to the River and fills its shabby clay jars. The running stream asks me wordless riddles, the lark punctuates his versifications with small pipings. I kneel and my knees creak—I sadly recall a time when they did not. The newest sun of a thousand warms my back like a winter dress as I lean into the chortling brook.

“Tell me a lesson about water, River,” I murmur, for River has always been my tutor, less stern than Mountain in his dreaming heights. And when River speaks, his voice is yellow and blue, the fringe on an emperor’s sedan chair, rustling imperceptible gold into the wind:

When you put your white foot into me, I part