Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,9

antelope grazing across my shoulder blades, leaping salmon on the soles of my tattered feet, dragonfly-knees, flames searing up my arms, river-belly, storm-brow, tree-spine. A fleur-de-lis branded onto the nape of my neck. And a great snail shell winding around itself, blazing on the small of my back. My lips she paints with the blood of enthralled trout, but my eyes, still yet uniform perfect white. And I lie against the silver bodies, empty within my mosaics of wounded buffalo and women carrying water, all rock and dripping water, all darkness and sleeping bears. Claws clack on my stones.

“You see what a beautiful thing I can make of the whiteness,” she laughed smokily, “this is the dream I insinuate, this is the discontent I plant like a seed of pearl in you, that grows like a cornstalk from my throat and fills the Void of you with little orbs of gold. I speak the tongues of the Door-tribe, and though I have no hinge and no bell-rope, in a way I am the Door that catches you, I enfold and take you to the world of faith-in-the-Center, of bone-desolation, of belief. I plant in you the conviction of the Monster, the Queen, the Castle, the Treasure. I destroy your nonchalance, I take your certainty of nothing. Now you will suffer, my pretty puella, for I give you in a casket whose angles are swords, the desire to find what cannot be found, the dread adoration of what is not. This is my gift to you.” I trembled under her avian eyes, numinous and desert-savage.

“I do not want it. I am happy enough here, walking.”

“You are the Seeker-After. Is that not what you said? It is not for you to be happy. You accept. Did that not also escape your white lips? The Labyrinth does not accept you. I am filling you up with Want like acetylene semen. You have been here too long. Did you not think the Doors had a function? All things do, even you, even I. It is a present. Make no mistake, there is nothing, no Center, no Monster, no Quest. But in your proximate madness you will believe it.” She paused to trace a lion’s tail around my toes.

“The Labyrinth is all. I will make a small place in the soil of you and bury the grafted seed of Yes. Is it not a beautiful gift I give you?” She beamed, a blue light that shook through her skin and hair, glowing corona and belt of nebulous ice-rings. Painted over with her hands I was frantic to escape the Angel, to continue as I had been, to Wander as I was meant, secure in the world I had delineated, whose moods and selves I knew.

“Please, Lady, I will not yield to even so beautiful a Door as you, I will not. I am the Seeker-After. Don’t you see? If I found a thing, I could not seek. Don’t change me. It is illusion, all of it.” I lifted myself slightly on pale palms as if to run, to escape the advent of Purpose. More terrible than the roses was this awful constriction, this assignment of identity, eradication of personality within her impetus. It would fill me up until I choked and there would be no “I” at all, only the Center-that-is-not. My breath had stopped, squeezed by her python voice, a panic of screams rising up like vomit.

“I am not quite a Door, you know,” she whispered, “nor quite an Angel. You will cry out for me before the end, if an end there is, can ever be.” She plucked a many-colored opal, swimming in a borealis of light, from her navel. “You do not yet understand. You do not even know your name. Keep this always by you, and thus keep me close to your skin. I will be always with you, and in you, and keep you, and guide you.”

She bent, heavy with her beauty, towards me in my wriggling silver throne, and kissed my slickly star-white mouth, warmly, full and musky with the smell of ice. The Angel bit into my lower lip, drawing deep rushes of marbled blood. Drawing back, licked hungrily where it had stained her chin.

And vanished. The ice receded from the Road, with no scar where she had drawn up her subterranean trout. I wanted to throw the Stone from me, but I could not. It was so warm clutched in my hand.

In my glyphbody I ran, wailing