Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,71

delta until I have sunk to my knees, grub his filthy bones and chunks of flesh from the earth, to pile them together in a grotesque cairn. When I found his intestines I had to loop them over my arms and around my neck, where they hung slimy and stinking, a mottled serpent-noose. They tried to drag me under.

It is what I was made for. The dream-search and the spill of his organs like egg yolks on glass. I hate the smell of him now, the curdled scent of his veins turned inside-out. It is all over me, gesticulating in my pores, his foreign sweat.

Yet I want the clavicle. It is smooth and clean of flesh. Dreaming within my dream I put it to my lips and play his collarbone like a macabre flute. My cedar-dusted fingers press into the marrow and low notes exude, sibilant and lurching down its barometric octave. Music throttles itself and serrates the wind.

Wherever the sound touches, the grass separates into dust and falls to the starving earth like a handful of torn pages.

I dream that he is death in death.

Barley Ripens

I-Ayako has become ill. I watch her retch by the River with disdain. Her body heaves like a blown sail when the wind changes. I hate that she is old, that her skin is no longer beautiful. Below, in the valley of the dream-village, shocks of green writhe like demoniac oceans—the barley comes of age and the I-Ayako adds our body’s sloughing to the earth.

My hands are not mine. Fingernails half-grown, jutting out like moons buried in a black-soiled field. I am only this lurching body. I am only this. These.

Yet, I begin to wonder about the body which hangs on me like torn clothes. If she dies, what will happen to us? Is there an I-above-all? An ideogram that is me and I and Ayako and all the dreams together—is there a divinity of first person? A prime mover of our limbs? We are afraid that she is failing us, that she will keep lurching into the water, vomiting and vomiting until she empties herself completely and we too have gone out of her by the throat-road. We are afraid the cramping body is the only real.

If she dies, will we simply blow apart, pine needles in a swift wind? Do the dreams possess location? Are we locative, dative, ablative? Where is the language of Us? What linguistic calculation could be made which would result in our variable, our presence outside of the Ayako-equation? We are cross-multiplied, we are exponential. She is not.

I am Ayako, and since she cannot answer, I cannot. When she/I drink our tea-less water, it falls into the flesh with worry edging its taste.

But in the morning it had passed, and our belly was calm.

Mantids Hatch Out

I dreamed of a great maze. It turned underneath me, left and right and over itself, a great snarl of brick and mortar. It was painted and at each turn a color faded into its mate, so that the whole expanse curled like some impossibly complex sea serpent—perhaps if I had lingered I could have read some forbidden language in its knot-work. I could almost scry its subterranean tongues, reaching into the earth—down, down, down.

It had a physiology, a throbbing anatomy of stone and pigment. I could mark the pathway of its blood, through arterial thoroughfares and bile ducts, descending organs, kidneys, tangled intestines. It was a body, whole and complete, but one which contained the bodies of others like stacked dolls—strange-skinned creatures with blank eyes, and in the shadows a great black bull tossing his horns. I dream it lies below me, its skin touching my skin, like a prone lover.

I put my dream-lips, my flaming mouth to it. But I am a virgin, I have not done it before, so of course, the fire spreads too quickly. It blanches the twisting walls, blackens the creatures to skeletons, doors to molten piles of knob and hinge. I arch my back and my breasts brush the bull-horns and the great wooden gate—they shatter into pyres. My toes curl at its angular walls, my incandescent womb opens and shuts, clamping at its architecture, clutching wildly at the maze. I am a holocaust, breathing heavily and writhing over my adored labyrinth, twisting my legs around its girth. I am the inferno, clamping my body over the adulated—and who could find the blood of my virginity in the embers of this city?

Everything is red now and