Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,90

the river ran.

They looked from me to each other, and back to me, some strange calculation clicking away in their furtive eyes. Their wrinkles fascinated me, etching their skin with rippling lines like hiragana, and I admit I spent some minutes trying to read the secrets of their senescence, the withered psalms written on their tired limbs. I was like a babe in those first hours—everything enchanted me, absorbed me utterly, until the next wonder tore my attention violently from the first marvel. And so it was that I was deep in the study of their wrinkled cheeks when one of them, the male, spoke to me—the first voice to flood itself into my ears.

“O, Lord of the Wind! You have deigned to appear to this old man! I have done no deed worthy of such an honor!” He pressed his brow to the cool grass, and the female swiftly did the same, as if answering some unheard cue, crying out as she did so, though her quavering voice was muffled, since she spoke into the blades:

“Susanoo-no-Mikoto, Heavenly Ocean-Father! How we have prayed for this day!”

It was at this that I knew myself, the utterance of the crone scrubbing aside the scorch-black of my sister’s rage, allowing me to see the walls of my godhead, the ceilings and floors of my name, my being, my history. It is always the peasants who know what they see—they are not befuddled by opium or intellect, as the city-dweller so often is. It took them not a moment to see past the gloss of my hair and the beauty of my new flesh and know that they were in the presence of the Sea-God, the sibling of Heaven, the seed of all storms. In the palaces of Hiroshima to the south, I would have had to tie on a great blue mask with a demoniac grimace and a nose like a bludgeoning club, trailing rainclouds behind me like a woman’s robes to make myself known. But this woman needed no theatrics, and calling me by name she gave me my name; and naming me she made me myself, and myself, named, knew for the first time the tang of exile, the shiver of loamy air untinged by golden vapors.

The taste of sorrow is the taste of broth which has grown a skin and begun to attract mayflies—it sticks in the throat, fecund and foul. Did I even then love my sister, forgive her, long, perhaps, for her ember-bronze arms slung round my shoulders again? For the taste of her cakes in the evening, the perfect seams of the robes she wove in the days when she was inclined to gift-giving? I worried the question between my jaws like a meat-ribboned bone.

I decided I did not. Let her have the skies—the earth would lay itself out under me like a wife. And what new storms would I make when I was my right self again! Typhoons like spinning sunflowers would flutter against these sands, winds and seas as I had never before attempted would rise up like carved columns under the roof of heaven. She would not restrain me here, not if I could find my way from this heavy flesh to my old radiance.

I was disturbed in these pleasurable thoughts by the peasants, still kneeling at the river. It was strange to me that they had not gone, having served such divine purpose as they had already done, but still they wept and beat their chests, their throats open to the rainless air. I was compassionate—it is easy to be compassionate.

“Why do you weep?” I said softly, with infinite grace, putting my hands, knuckles raw and new, to the poor couple’s heads.

“It is our daughter, Storm-King,” the man said bitterly. “Kushinada, whose hair was dark as ink pooled in the belly of a crow, whose skin was pale as new-sewn silk! She was our only happiness—one by one, our daughters have disappeared into the air, but she, at least, was left to us, fair enough to marry an Emperor, if she cast her eyes to his throne! But she would not look so high, for our girl was humble as a mound of straw, and asked for no more than to cook simple rice-mash, and fish-eye soup, and serve weak tea to her poor parents.”

“And where has this marvelous daughter gone?”

“Gone? She would not go,” said the mother indignantly, “she was meek, meek as a deer startled by the moon’s weight on a