Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,68

well—my teacups, rough hewn from River’s fleshy clay, do not stand up quite right. Some of the tea is always lost, the sour green liquid sits at an awkward angle and sloughs out when my fingers brush the rim. My fingers, my dream of fingers, are not so graceful. I lose the tea, down my chin, out to glass, onto the earth. I cannot keep it all in my mouth. I am too small for it, and the cups too poorly made.

The wine-sack, too, is gone. I woke, forcing the Ayako-eyelids open as early spring sunlight pried at me greedily, and it was gone. I think perhaps it is wrong for me to miss it. I think I should be content with what Mountain brings and ask for nothing else. Then again, perhaps it is not me.

I warm water in my little pot and pretend I can taste the sharp star-points of tea in my throat. It is enough, but somehow, it is not.

Doves Spread Their Wings

I stand in my cloak of embers and stir the dream-earth, my skin-scald medieval and slant-eyed. Sage, peppermint, wormwood are scorched beneath me—I care nothing, nothing at all. Rain like inkwells pummel my sternum, my haunch. Away from the islands that River made, the ion-trail that is my flesh sears the sky.

There is nothing here but the fire-dream, the savage flesh and the stern destroyer, nothing but death under the wide elms, the staunch oaks, death under my own eyes bleeding gold paint, my frescoed mouth, flooded with tempura and cobalt-poisoned blood, the lead of murder-pipes.

I choke, I cough up a wreck of wood pulp and iodine, I drown in my own fluid-flame, in the churned death of volcanic paths, the whirling leaf-self which dervish-scours all in me that would lie well in beds of birch-bark, in beds like paper, where books like this one, which is not mine but hers—the dream-hermit, where books like hers are written in sweat, the manuscript of elongated muscles illuminated in diamond salivations.

I am a vessel of salted meat, eyes glazed over by an abundance of nights, a surfeit of dream-visions wherein I touch human breath. There is a film over my dream-body, a veil which cannot be touched or torn. My heart beats seven times and stops, ventricles covered in thick gasoline. It is only in the stopped heart, the deadened pulse that I can discover any revelation, that any ease is to be unearthed.

I am already blackening the soil, already devouring the root systems of baobabs and dandelions, already seething in my half-living skin. Stamp, stamp, stamp, beast rampant on a verdant field and I am nothing but a heraldic smear, blood on stained glass—the sun refracts through me onto the faces of the faithful and I am again only skin, only surface, only the fur and lip of a woman.

Seize this chimeric body, this betraying flesh and it will always and only escape.

I am a tooth, a body of teeth, and I pierce through as though the world were made of water. What else can I ever be but this black-eyed eater of men? What patchwork breasts can I offer up to the screaming stars that will ever satisfy their dark tongues? My back flares wide and strong under the sky, under the moon with horns like mine. Alone I corrode the earth, alone I carve shapes into the path. I walk uncloven, and open my woman’s mouth to swallow darkness until my jaws crack.

I search for a city, I search for walls. I search for the dream of flammable materials.

The Hoopoe Descends to the Mulberry

The boy who brought tea had clean fingernails. That is how I knew he was a dream—what villager can keep his hands clean after working in the rice fields, at the butcher, the blacksmith, mending the well-rope, spreading pitch on the bottoms of fishing boats? So I spoke to him, since dreams are my peculiar surrogate family, I felt I had the right. That it was my duty to address the dream and call it by name, so that it would stay and join all my other dreams in their agate-toed walk. After all, I had no boy-dreams.

He was very pretty, with unkempt hair and limpid eyes. His narrow hips seemed to jut a challenge, though I am long since the days when the hips of men pointed to me. He extended his offerings to me, trembling—he was the fear-dream, then, the dream of cold sweat. I liked watching his