Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,72

I dream my own laughter is a scorch-mark, my thighs tightening on the maze-roads send them up like cheap matches. My belly lifts up and a rain of naphtha-sweat gleams on the already engorged flames—and I am laughing, laughing, laughing as I burn divinity into this place.

What could I ever be but this black-eyed eater of cities?

When I leave the dream maze, still full of my heat and sweat, I can smell the flesh of the bull cooking, smoky and sweet.

And I search again, for another, for the beloved, for the bed-notch, for a city who will sing my love out in unmeasured lyrics.

The Shrike Calls

“What did you want to ask me that day?” the Moth mused in his thick voice, rubbing his forelegs together lazily. I sat with him in the shade of the second floor, escaping the early summer heat.

“I was going to ask you for a lesson,” I answered. “Gate and River tutor me. More often when I was young, but still, from time to time.”

“I am only a Moth, I know how to eat wool and seek light. If you want to know these things, I can teach you.”

“No. I am not sure there are answers which would have meaning for me any longer. I am a bad student. I am too weak to be the wife of Alone.”

The Moth shrugged. “Why do you not go up to the third level? Perhaps there is something there which would have meaning for you.”

I-Ayako looked up through the slatted floorboards, the slant of unassuming light that filtered through to land, moth-like, on my open palm.

“It is so far. I have only just come to this level.”

“I do not wish to stay in your pagoda. I have heard rumor of a beautiful flame in the city, and I go tonight to meet my family there. So I cannot tutor you. I do not have the time. Ask the third floor.” And with that, the Moth spread his stately, cream-spattered wings and flitted out of the tower.

It was a far more difficult climb than it had been to the second floor. The walls were smoother and bore less paint. I tore three fingernails in the ascent, and when I pulled myself, almost weeping, onto the next knotted floorboards, my hands bled freely.

The angled room was bare except for a few forlorn grasshoppers and a small statue which stood in the far corner. Time had erased its face from the stone, but it stood, calm, seraphic. Gray featureless rock stared out at me and there were no sounds save the cries of prey-birds circling.

The Butcherbird is Silent

I dream that I can string the Questions and Answers together on a long line of catgut, like little wooden prayer beads, or a thread drawn through thick leather. I dream I can see them all around my shaggy neck, sparkling against my fur. I hold the heft of them in my paws, matched pairs like chromosomes, AB, CD, KL, XY.

I hold a plethora of halves. Each time a man comes to gain entrance to the city, he completes a set and my collection grows. It is an art, and I am skilled at it. Perhaps at the end of time I will truly hold them together like a great necklace, a grand unified theory of interrogation. Each time their flesh touches my tongue with dark and secret flavors, I inch closer, my books tilt towards balance.

A boy came wandering with heavy-lidded eyes, the droop of the lashes that can only mean extreme enlightenment—or opium addiction. His fingers were long and pale, funereal, with fingernails I imagined would taste of ripe dates. I began to quiver with anticipation and desire.

The boy brushed hair of a watery shade from his forehead and looked languorously up and down my body.

And yet it is stupid and simple. I ask him to calculate the relativistic mass of a single photon. He blinks stupidly, he is flustered, he cannot answer. The ritual has become almost mute—no arcane spray of ash over their bodies could cure them of their pride. They all think I am a beast, a monster with no mind, able only to spout my riddles by rote.

I must explain to him, painstakingly—for I must supply the Answer if he cannot, it the least courtesy I can provide—how the mass of a particle is proportional to its total energy E, and involving the speed of light, c, in the proportionality constant: m = E/c2.

His expression reminds me that occasionally