Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,8

reflecting on my rippling skin the wormwood and the moonseed, the orris root and the milkweed. Who can ever know what I have seen there revealed? The shadows know, in their depths and scrying sleek. Whether when I in a fever cross a drawbridge made for children with smaller feet than I, a troll with ambergris eyes lurks delicately beneath the creaking wood. Whether at the Center-which-is-not of all of this rests a quiescent Minotaur, his horns resplendent with blood and ash, death in an amulet around his neck, eyes like shuriken, a great brass ring in his poisonvelvet nose. Whether his volcanic heart thumps in time to mine, whether he waits for me in the geometric darkness, to wed himself to the Labyrinth forever in the sacred ritual of my dismemberment.

Will I serve as a corridor between them? I fear a Minotaur. I fear hooves tramping in showers of the white blood of lotuses, crushing Franciscan bones under him. Hooves separating brow from skull, viscera of the “I” that is me digested through a Maze of four stomachs (for do not all we Labyrinth creatures carry the turning Path inside us. We carry so much, all of us pregnant with incident.) I fear a Lair of rattling sternums and tibia, prayer ropes and iron ore. But there is no Center to house a Lair to hold a Beast, so if one echoes in this place, he must roar his acidic throat to razors among the halls of where-I-have-not-walked, and stalks, a hunter like the rest. Some ways back I saw a pile of Doors splintered and broken like moldered corpses. They had a smell of rotted almonds and shoe leather. Am I to be as they are, cracked and bleeding in the jeweled hinges of a vengeful Gate?

“Hic monstra delitescunt. Sed puella, puella, ubi abscondes?”

Voice like a rustling of linden leaves, like sand becoming a pearl. My hand fluttered to my mouth in terror, hiding the shameful whiteness of my lips. She sat on a Wall of salmon scales, which clinked and jingled as she turned her perfect face towards me, eyes full of hawk’s claws. Her wings reached back over the crest of the Wall and nearly brushed the ground, arched and pointed, of feathered ice and lapis lazuli. Her body covered in a skin of milky opals, clinging to her breasts and belly, her long arms and her bare feet. I could not speak. My blank statue-eyes were helpless, could offer nothing to her beauty. In her hands a slim rod of ash and spider-thread, she was fishing in the Road, a hole cut in the ice of a left-hand turn. An Angel of Ice-Fishing. She was smoking a long reed pipe, tobacco that smelt of cranberries and elephant-skin. And hauling trout from the Road in great silver heaps, flopping beside her on the Wall. Some leapt ecstatically towards her, not waiting for the line and bait.

I climbed up, clumsy and strange in my lightbody, full of cold and slowness. In the mountains of fish I found a resting place, leaning against the marine brickwork. Amid a corona of smoke she pressed the rod-end into a crack in the Wall. The fish still threw themselves at her opaline body, eyes full of her form. She curled her lips into

“Hic monstra delitescunt, cara.”

I looked up into her and choked, “You speak the language of the Doors!”

She breathed her jungle tobacco into my pale mouth. “Yes,” she hissed, “Do you think perhaps I am a Door?”

I could not answer, tongue thick in my bloodless mouth. The Angel leaned into me, cold radiating from her owl-skin. She began to draw on my papery flesh in stark black chalk on my belly and lunar, heavy breasts. Her finger was cold.

“The key to catching trout is the lure,” she intoned throatily, tracing a horse-shape on my thigh. “Today they are biting on dragonflies smeared in my blood.” She exhales, long and critically, editorializing her drawing with smoke-rings. She began on a spiraling snake, just below my left shoulder. “Tomorrow it will be roasted cicadas. They are fickle.”

“Sometimes I am a cicada, hissing and singing in the leaves of a tree by the sunlit water, thoughtless and wordless, a voice that is all consonants and tribal clicks. Sometimes I rub my legs together like a string bass, and the lake quivers.” She listened intently to me, as if diagnosing a tumor hiding in my voice.

Slowly she took possession of me through the figures;