Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,84

infinitely blue. Instinctively, these selves seek each other out and merge, unable to comprehend the depravity of their conviction that a single woman can serve as a hinge around which they all turn. The resulting sea of constantly merging and disengaging selves resembles the primordial mitosis-swamp—the infinite female, treading water in a mass of pure, white light.

“I don’t think you are listening to me,” the dream-Sphinx said crossly. “Have you solved the Riddle yet? I think I have given you plenty of time. What goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening? It isn’t even a very good Riddle. You should have heard the last one.”

Suddenly, the Prince’s rather dull face lit up with revelation.

“I do!” he cried, leaping to his feet, “I do! A man does, I mean.”

And the Sphinx smiled.

“Don’t congratulate yourself too much. It isn’t the Riddle after all, that you have conquered, but the Riddle that conquers you.”

Oedipus did not even do her the honor of eating her, but rather stabbed her with his dagger and watched her die with the peculiar satisfaction of aristocracy. He left her corpse to the flies and the desert-birds. And her body was the color of the dream-sand, which even as she bled began to cover her in gold, and preserve her bones as relics.

As she died, the dream-Sphinx uttered her last Riddle, which is, of necessity, unanswerable.

Of course, Oedipus, your story is already told, too. The King is dead, the Queen is dead, your daughters and sons are dead, and you are blinded on the road to Colonus. This is as easy to read as an answer in the back of a mathematics textbook. It has already been a hundred times over, a thousand. There can be no free will in the Wasteland. We are all bound up together, belly to belly to belly.

When one possible woman dies, it is as though a shutter closes, and the light from a certain window is snuffed out. There are many, many more windows, and really, since the window had already been opened and shut an infinite number of times, since in potential it occupies both the states of Open and Shut, nothing changes at all. Is this process indefinite?

Water Begins to Freeze

“I do not want to, Fox. Just tell me my lesson. They are mine, I do not like to see them written. They are my own, no one else’s.”

“The more you possess, the wiser you become?” Fox asked, with an arch expression. I blushed.

“I did not say I was wise.”

“This is the way. Each by each, night falls and the rivers freeze over, the black branches gather ice, the seeds sleep in the earth and dream the peculiar dreams of rooted things. The cicadas stop singing, the crickets die. You are not separate from this. Stories end, riddles are answered. If there is no end, no story has been told. Though the answers to a single riddle are infinite, the number of correct answers is finite—there is but one. I am the answer to you. I am the second bead, that which completes your question.”

Night had stolen up the side of the pagoda, twisted dark fingers into the vines, and now shone blackly across the floor.

“Then the I-that-is-Ayako is the true thing. The others are false,” I concluded with sorrow.

“In the end, silk-child, does it matter which is which?”

“To me, it matters,” I pleaded.

“When it does not, then you will be wise.” The Fox licked her paw and gestured towards me. “Turn the page,” she said softly.

Earth Begins to Freeze

There is an old circus trick: a girl lets a serpent swallow her whole. Beautiful people pay their pennies and see a woman become the apple of Eden, devoured by the grinning dragon, writhingly slick with olive oil so that when the tattered red curtains shut, her partner can haul her feet-first from those hinged jaws, a grotesque, hermaphroditic birth enacted every night at seven and nine o’clock sharp. This act requires both the serpent and the girl’s consent—neither can perform it without the other. The old serpent lets herself be abused by the lovely woman and the crowd, but in exchange, she enjoys the bliss of reliving the meal over and over again.

In the audience, perhaps a mother will whisper to her child, “That was how the old stories say it was in the beginning of the world, when Tiamat, who was Queen of the Watery Abyss, was destroyed and the earth