Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,70

He wears his creams and fawns with the grace of a salaried courtier. He sits in the shadows and lets his antennae waft with the breeze. Often he will land on my hair or my sandals, (which require mending again) and his furry belly will rub imperceptibly against my skin.

“Moth, tell me . . . ” I whisper in a voice like an autumn frog-song.

“Yes?” he hisses, rubbing his paper crane-wings together.

“Nothing.”

Cucumbers Flourish

This morning, before the dream-sun could report me, I swallowed one of their villages.

I simply drew my knees together and it vanished, caught between my moss-bones and my vine-skin. I felt the roofs splinter and pop against me, the cattle scream and the temple bells shatter. My thighs exulted, trembling with a shivered joy. I tried to conceal my sighs of delight as they all crushed inwards and were finally silent.

When my knees fell back, there was no trace. Mountain and River did not notice. They are busy with the Palace. They have called the ocean creatures together to fill a great jade vat of ink, in order to inscribe their names over the Gate, and the History of the World. River rests the vat on my belly while he blows smoke rings at the scaffolding which has by now obscured my jaw almost entirely.

I am wasting. I begin to wonder if the villages would sustain me. If I only swallow a few at a time, perhaps they will not notice. They have set the red sun on my steps, and he is now my gold-chinned jailor, arcing over me, back and forth, dragging his great clunking cloud-chains behind him.

There is much activity on my body, and they have poured the foundation of the Palace from a blood-mash of cartilage. The miners tap, tap, tap at my jaw through the night, piling up teeth like cairns, piling them up in wheelbarrows and crates, in baskets and slings. I have heard Mountain suggest seventeen balconies. River plans a tower from which to view the History, when it is finished.

The Bitter Herb Grows Tall

I must confess that there is another dream. It is the dream of the silent girl. It is very small, and the I-that-is-Ayako is ashamed. It is not nearly so grand as the others.

In the dream I am wearing gray—very soft, cat-like. I am washed in blue light. The dream-girl is alone, for all of the dream-us is alone. We come from Ayako—we cannot be other than she, and she is alone beyond dreams of solitude.

Her dream-hair is drawn into a knot at her neck, but strands have escaped and blow darkly against her shoulders. This dream does not move. She does not change. The heart in her beats very slowly, and she wets her lips from time to time. After a pass of her delicate tongue, the lower lips shines silver. That is all.

She peers out a window at a long expanse of trees, which whisper to each other in the night, passing along what rumors there are that concern trees. In front of her/me is well-made paper, stacked together neatly, as if we meant it to stay; all her pens lie motionless in their pots. She has rings on her knuckles, and she taps them against the paper, making a thickly muffled noise. But other than this she does not move, and the paper is blank.

I do not know why she sits at the bottom of the Ayako-belly like a solemn stone. But she is there, and in their orbits, the dreams seem to turn towards her as they pass.

Grasses Wither

I found your clavicle, white as a wand. The grasses are beginning to turn brown at the tips now—not much, but a little, the gold before rot sets in. In the dream of the sister-wife, they seem to wave like tiny hands, the hands of children drowning. It called out to me among the reeds, plaintive and small.

I dreamed that I wanted it, the long chalky expanse, lying in the red soil like a hyphen—the sentence of your body unfinished. I wanted to put my mouth to the ulcerated predicate, to complete you with my tongue and lips and teeth, to bite you off and continue the flesh of you down into my own. In my hand it looks alien, an infinitive from a foreign language covered in bone.

I dream that I hate the owner of the bone. The dream-brother, ghost-husband. I collect him like marbles over half a desert, I crouch in the silt-ridden