Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,66

bands: white, blue, yellow, orange. It is possible that all women are one woman, who has already lived, died, conflagrated and drowned.

It is possible that men are also connected this way.

Despite this, I love because it is my nature the dream-taste of all possible flesh on all possible tongues.

The First Lightning Flashes

The milk was warm and thick, better than the throat-that-is-Ayako has had in many years. In the early days I used to pray to Mountain to send me a little goat I could love and who would keep me warm with her wool, whom I could milk. Perhaps I could even strain cheese from the milk. Instead he sent rabbits and squirrels to eat. But I did not complain.

And strangely, with the sweet milk circling my teeth I was completely Ayako. I was within her tightly and hotly, blooded and fleshed. The dream-women fled and I was the white singularity at the center, open, iconic. Self flowed into self and all things flowed selfwards. The milk seeped through me in ornate patterns, a complicated knot work separating fractal-bright in my veins, which in themselves separated and separated further like winter branches thinning into twigs.

I was truly alone for a moment, and the temple was whole, gilt-edged. Incense sighed from my pores. I forgot the lion-dream and the fire-dream. I forgot the dream-husband and the dream-sister.

The phosphor-stars shone through a hole in the distant roof, and clouds drifted over the moon like mendicant’s rags. And under their house-blankets and mist-curtains I was Ayako, and no other.

But soon the wine-sack was empty, and sleep brushed my ears with her ash-lips.

The Empress Tree Flowers

In my dream, I begin to plan a revenge. My breasts and my thighs conspire.

Mountain cuts an alpine range through my torso, tumescent summits swell up horribly, boils of dirty snow. River is rewarded for his complicity, he flows now directly into the mouth of my womb. I am his banks, I am his delta, I am his floodplain. His fat throat giggles as he encourages himself into frothing rapids along my cattail-ovaries.

But inside the dream of the belly-winds, the revenge-dream begins to form like a gilled fetus, in a satori of suspended animation, poised on a curious tiptoe like a Neolithic messenger-god. I am horribly open between them; they have polished my skin like banisters so that they can live inside me, playing checkers on my painfully elongated spine.

Quietly, I start to gather clouds across the black line of my collarbone, to hide the star-areolae from their sweating glances, from Mountain and River, who hold my battered legs open. I take the stars away, I rob their treasure house of all those white jewels, I let them laugh and drink from me like tavern-thieves and all the while I am robbing them of all possible skies.

I turn the dream-oceans dark, shade by shade. They deepen like a bruise: yellow, blue, indigo, black. I spit pigment into the waves, onto the new islands that have burst up in the west, onto the silent continents. I stain everything black. There are no harbors, there are no ports.

But there are villages. River coughs, Mountain smokes his pipe, and between the saliva and the smoke I find thatched roofs in my knee-pits, marketplaces in my sternum. They sink wells in my tear-ducts. I suckle a generation of water-diviners.

I hear them whispering, where a tributary winds up the cloud-side of Mountain. They are planning a Palace of my teeth. Molar-turrets, incisor-halls, portcullis of canines. When it is finished it will block my throat and I will never speak again. They send in canaries and cartographers to map the veins of usable enamel.

But they work slowly. I have time.

Moles Metamorphose into Quails

A hawk sat that evening in the pink flush of sunset picking at grass seeds, not looking up or down, only at the seeds which will now never sprout. And possibly I, too, the Ayako-body and the fire-body and the wind-body and the lion-body and the wife-body, germinate together in some dread aviary stomach wall, fed only by blood and bile and the occasional field mouse, growing dark and strange, with limbs the color of pupils. In the mirror of gastronomy I do not recognize a woman, only flesh, only bone, only the swift-scarlet ventricles of quickening tongues. I see only multiplicities. My feet are rooted in this unimaginable belly, as are theirs. Toes disappear into fluid, into soft veins and pulsation, into rhythms inconceivable, irredeemable, and un-patterned. In the belly of the