Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,95

little sapling—so carefully, as if it were a baby itself, in warm red soil. My sisters used to play in it, pelting each other with orange fruit whose meat smelled of spices we would never purchase to scent our skins.

I remember that now, in the dark, grafted to smoke-flesh/hanging from me like a necklace I bought long ago and lost in a drawer/like that old dark wood—my sisters throwing sweet scraps of my birth-flesh at each other, staining their dresses with sugared oil/the heartwoods of my throats playing catch-me with their own pulpy wombs.

When I was a girl I gutted the fish my father caught, and their intestines slithered over my fingers, over and under, like weaving silver—their eyes went into our soup, for which the we were modestly famous, and rest of the village came to our stall in the marketplace at festival time, to slurp up the murky broth with all those sightless eyes floating in it, eaten staring at eater/and it is always like that, you know, the thing which cannot help but be eaten ogles the thing which will eat it, and always, always, the moist eyes are beautiful, their dark centers salty and sour/but the fish eyes, the fish eyes were too soft for my taste, runny eggs dripping their iris-ichors on my tongue, the black soup that stank in our house all year/Yours, Kazuyo, were smoky and sere, persimmon-dusk, and they rolled over my tongue, so soft—do you remember that, how you saw me as I swallowed you, saw my uvula bobbing over your limbs as you fell into me?

Hush, now. I have not gotten to that part yet. (And I/you/say this to the self/notself which is not myself/but is myself, my selves, my daughterbody and my snakebody all wound up together like yarn/the self embedded in green muscle wall/hush, self, hush, quiet, bones, blood says be still/the self of/cell-to-cell, I say this to the eater which is eaten which is eater again/and hungry.)

The soup of eyes brought men to our threshold, men with chickens hanging limp like claw-stemmed bouquets in their hands, with rice balls like diamond rings. They came to get the eye-girls for their own, to fill up their bellies with salty-sour tear ducts on off-festival days as well, and we were lined up, eight in a row, only I even old enough to boast breasts. Our heads bent like black daffodils, nodding mutely at the earth. They looked at our teeth; they tested our jaws and our water-carrying muscles, the length and dexterity of our stirring fingers. And, as they will, a man indicated that I was sufficient to bear his children and clean his house and boil his broth for all the rest of my days. He was not ugly, nor old, and his eyes were very black. I thought, idly, what they would look like staring back at me from a bowl of soup/only ask, daughterflesh, and I will fetch them for you like a pair of buttons to shine your breast/hush, hush, I’ve told you. This is what virgins think about when their wombs are sold.

It was midwinter, I think—in truth I cannot recall, but it seems to me from the vantage of these copper-blooded innards that the trees were bare and bone-rattled, that the sky was impassive and pale as a face. /It was midsummer, you silly girl, and I watched you walk out under the eaves from a bower of green, and the sun was beating my back with switches of yellow light. So much green, so many leaves, all my heads lolled out of the trees and you saw nothing but bobbing fruit.

It doesn’t matter.

I wanted you then, like a husband, in your clean white wimple. Only I didn’t know how to be a husband, it is not my natural state. All I have are these mouths, these mouths and these tongues and these coils, and they all cried out for you that hot, still day, and I thought you were very beautiful in your dress, and I wanted to eat you, but I wanted to love you, but I wanted to eat you, but I wanted to love you/but I wanted to/I wanted/I wanted to love you.

The man who was neither old nor ugly took my hand and led me from the threshold of my house, and the sun was neither yellow nor grey, and I looked back over my shoulder at the persimmon tree, which was very tall by then, tall as