Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,73

there is beauty to be found in blankness.

And yet, another pair of wooden beads is drawn together, the oil from each mingling, and the weight of my necklace increases. It is for the city planners to worry that the population does not swell, that traders avoid the walls, that no beautiful foreign brides are brought with almond eyes. I fulfill my duty, the coupled words are spoken, and I increase.

This boy sat heavily in my belly, tasting of iodine and oatcakes. I am exhausted of this work, and yet it goes on. I am bombarded by photons with cruel masses, with high cheekbones and stiletto heels. Light sits heavily on my lap, an old whore as bored as her customer is disgusted. But it is the disgust that keeps it going. Disgust, at least, is tangible and real.

If there is a monster there must be a man, or woman, to approach it. It is the way of things. Perhaps when I have brought together all the beads, it will cease to be the way of things. And then I will rest and let Thebes be damned.

Deer Break Antlers

I-within-Ayako could not breathe. I could not move. Tears rushed from my eyes like a spring from a rock wall, streaming down my cheeks, mixing with sweat and grime from the climb up onto the creaking floor of the third level. My throat was a boulder against a tomb, my limbs a sudden dark wax, flooding into each other, under and around the radiance of the stone figure. I could not think. My mind was empty of everything but it, even the dreams, even the dreams.

Its face, luminous and round as all the suns I have ever known, stared out, beatific, sorrowing, without eyes or mouth. The sorrow penetrated me like a hand, holding my heart, holding all of me that can be moved by beauty, holding me like the mother that died, spilling over with forgiveness. Nothing I had ever done or been or imagined myself mattered, only this ancient stone whose name I could not begin to guess. What god had it been meant to show? I did not know, could not know, but for a slow blink of the sun’s eye, it erased every shadow I had dragged behind me like a tawdry merchant’s cart, its one broken hand gracefully bent into a mudra of seraphic gentleness.

It made me a child in braids and a poor dress, crawling into my mother’s lap and pressing my face into her warm skin. I sobbed against her, my bones cracking open and my deepest blood pouring over her absolving hands. I died away from the dreams. I and the stone were the whole universe, for a moment that stretched out in all directions, an infinite plane of liquid jewels, she was all things, and the smooth gray of its faded eyelids filled my vision with a great burning. All of me was on fire, incandescent, my legs, my mouth, my tears searing as they coursed, rivers of naphtha scalding and cleansing. It was inside me, purging me of all that was not light. I was made of gold, singular, my skin kindled and blazed, I saw nothing at all before me but endless plains of its light and mine flooding together like tributary and river, river and sea.

“Stone,” I wept, my face swollen with tears, “tell me a lesson about myself.”

Stone considered for a moment, and began.

Cicadas Begin to Sing

The cicada lies in the earth for seventeen years. It is warm and dark there, it is soft and wet. Its little legs curl underneath it, and twitch only once in a little while. What does the cicada dream when it is folded into the soil? What visions travel through it, like snow flying fast? Its dreams are lightless and secret. It dreams of the leaves it will taste, it composes the concerto it will sing to its mate. It dreams of the shells it will leave behind, like self-portraits. All its dreams are drawn in amber. It dreams of all the children it will make.

And then it emerges from the earth, shaking dust and damp soil from its skin. It knows nothing but its own passion to ascend—it climbs a high stalk of grass and begins to sing, its special concerto to draw the wing-pattern of its beloved near. And as it sings it leaves its amber skin behind, so that in the end, it has sung itself into a new body in