Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,89

discarded body. I felt them press in to hear, and the juniper trees bent to catch it.

The Waters and Swamps Are Thick And Hard

Alone, with the mist creeping in like a pale-mouthed thief, Mountain wept.

THE

GRASS-CUTTING

SWORD

A field of mustard,

no whale in sight,

the sea darkening.

—Buson

0

IZUMO

Descent is a peculiar behavior.

There is a sensation of being dragged by the glisten of the bowels. There is a sensation of being pushed at the crown of the skull by a lead-etched palm. There is a silence, and there is a detonation of air, a detonation of sudden light. A new fontanel beats nebulous and netted at the place where tectonic bone-plates converge, a gauze of flesh pink and shimmering, a trembling crevice where before there was only wholeness.

I set these symptoms down for those who might descend after me, for those other red-chested colossi expelled by the sun-woman, cast out by her bronze hands, the boil-blaze of her justice. For it is certain my sister will find fault in others as she found fault in me; some blue-black kernel of my nature which, buried at the depth of sinew, scratched against the red-gold bead of hers.

But I am magnanimous—I grant that our two natures could not inhabit a single heaven. I forgave her, even as she burned against my fog-limbs, even as her ribcage irradiated mine with its feathered fire, even as the salt-sea was dried from my mouth by her banishing blow.

After all, we are family, she and I.

Of course, I thought of none of this then. Then, there was only the air and the light, and the fall through tiers of star and ether, the light of her golden heels receding above me, and the earth below, green and checkered with watery rice-fields, their squares made radiant by the reflection of my descent. I understood nothing but the sky-roar and the grass-beckon: I did not even comprehend my name—the last brassy exhalation of Ama-Terasu obliterated it from my mind, and replaced what had been my name with a devouring whirlpool, black and spinning—and it was this, finally, which cut me from heaven as a spleen is cut from a diseased body.

One hopes it will cure the patient, but one cannot be sure.

The grass-leaves of Izumo were the first I ever touched with feet enfleshed. It was there my heel-pads first bent and crushed green things, there I first opened up my lungs like windows and breathed the air of the world. I was naked, my hair unpinned. I was a man, and my knees were knot-strong. I was surprised, of course. Mine was the first descent of all the Kami, I had neither map nor report of a wild-toed predecessor to direct me on my way—and so all things were bright and sharp, painful in their novelty, colors that scalded my eyes, as though a pan of steaming water had been flung at me. I believe I might have stood, knowing nothing but that I had fallen, but not what or whom had done the falling, until the moon flickered and snuffed itself out, had I not heard a terrible sound: wails and ululations like the keening of roosters who know they are to be slaughtered for soup.

I followed the terrible sound until I came upon a long river, winding through the quiet fields in the pleasant way that well-tamed rivers will. It was unremarkable as rivers go, its water more or less greenish-brown, its current neither quick nor sluggish, its span perhaps that of four or five men laid head to foot. Having by now seen many rivers and their tributaries, their deltas, their silt and their sand, I think it was rather paltry, but it was to me on that first day the most beautiful of all possible rivers, sparkling in the morning like a stream of jewels tumbling down to the sea. So enraptured was I that I forgot the piercing cries I had sought, and stared transfixed at the splashing eddies, struck dumb with admiration. And so it was only when the shrieks ceased, as if cut off with a choking fist, that I looked up, startled from my dream of perfect rivers, and saw the first humans my incarnate-eyes had known.

Like the river, they were neither lovely nor hideous, but plain and peasant-colored, quite aged, clothed in simple kimono the hues of which were not unlike the earthy shades of the river-bank where they knelt, tearing their hair in unworded grief.

Green and brown their clothing folded; green and brown