Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,64

for you. But when you drink, though it is cool and sweet, you part for me.

“River,” I say, “tell me a lesson about earth.” And when River speaks, his voice is green and gray, the mist sloughing down into the valley.

If you plant your meager bed, perhaps a bed-tree will grow, perhaps it will not. But in the ranks of beds and trees and planters, only Mountain abides.

“River,” I whisper, so as not to disturb the harp-tongues of the lark-flock, “tell me a lesson about wind.” And when River speaks, his voice is white and rose, the air stirring new blossoms.

When wind touches the water-birds, it turns them the thousand colors of snow. Yet it does not change you.

“River,” and now I am almost asleep again, my lips scarcely move to make the words, “tell me a lesson about fire.” And when River speaks, his voice is tinged with red, its edges flushed and hot.

Flame travels on strange feet. Its heart is never twice the same.

And down by the dream-river, among jars of mottled clay, I sleep and write these lessons with the others on the tablet of my wax-flesh.

Eaglehawks Metamorphose into Doves

There is a dream-sister. She is all red, even her nipples that cut open the flesh of the sea. When the sun rises over our islands, which lie like a beaded necklace on the green waves, she drinks the light in a goblet of vines. When she sleeps, she sleeps in the curve of my waist, which is also red.

I dream there is no loneliness, I dream that she drinks my sorrow up like the dawn. This is the fire-dream, and I know it, for my limbs burn. I recognize the necklace of orange wedges and crab’s eyes I wear, I recognize the bird-bright throat of my sister.

It is the fire dream and I am going to die.

I dream that it is River once more who holds me down with his turquoise hands, and my sister’s arms are full of stones. One by one she brings the black rocks down onto my body, my sky-skull, the fine bones of my flaming feet. My lava-blood spurts like semen from throttled skin, leaping out as if it hated me. She crushes me under her vitreous stones, under her talon-hands, under her grunts and screams like a skewered boar.

I am not afraid. My bones grind to dust with joy, frenzy, the marrow liquefies ecstatically. In River’s strange-nailed grip I writhe and laugh, tiny flame-hiccups erupting from my bloodied lips. She rains down on me white-eyed quartz, basalt, feldspar, granite. She stuffs my mouth with dream-coal like an apple, and I can feel the seraphic pleasure of my teeth cracking. She is releasing me, and my flesh gobbles her stones as greedily as a child.

The dust-stuff of my bones River gathers together and mashes with rice-paste and goat-fat; into this he pours plaster. He makes of me an island chain, rounded as beads of sweat bubbling to the surface of the froth-torn sea.

And I rise out of my bones like steam—they are nothing but mute earth, now. I am a naked fire, with breasts of naphtha and sardonic knees, I am beyond what once was the red of flesh and the dream of the sister, the crab-iris of my pendant and the blue molars that River sunk into my neck so tenderly as the last rock rushed down and bit into my brain.

In the dream I am free, I range out, flitting from place to place, faceless, formless and wild, painting my scalded heels with ocean. The jellyfish pout in the harbor like little mouths, translucent and pure, swallowing nothing. All paths are taken—I fan out over possibles like hair on lightless water; my matchstick-braids swing wide and encompass heartless mountain-architectures, skulls and steppe-altars, the shape of a crone scraping circles into the sand.

I am a body of flame, without steel-jointed bones. The dream-sister released me and only the fire remains, the fire and the voice, my voice, that ever-owl-screeching voice, banshee-bright on a hundred infant hills that are the old body, that thump like a suffocating trout, tail to the starry south.

The Swallows Return

“Why do you not go up to the second floor of the pagoda?”

I leapt up from the rush-bed of River, the hair of Ayako-I tangled up with twists of milky grass. A great Mountain Goat stood before me on hooves of pyrite, his shaggy wool twisted gray and white, snow and stone, colors of the roots of old