Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,96

a standing serpent, and if something moved in the branches I thought nothing of it, only that it was empty of fruit, that the bark of my afterbirth was barren as a rotted root. I wanted to/see something of myself in the wood, something of my umbilicus wavering in the grain, something silver and unnamable which was my own flesh grown sap-ridden and forked. But there was nothing there, and I left my mother’s house, and all my sisters, heads still bent like a tidy row of carrot-flowers, with nothing for a trousseau but the thick white linen of my headdress and the secret of the soup of eyes nestled next to my heart.

It was on the beaten road south-winding from Izumo/it was near the temple/it was nowhere in particular but somewhere between these when I/when you/when the empty-we-I came reeding by. Do you remember, is it round in your mind like an orange fruit/it is round in my mind like a floating eye/I remember how your hair shone like a braised pig-stomach in the summer/it was winter/in the summer which was so still, and so warm.

And you/I/said to me/you/as if you did not see the man who was neither old nor ugly at all/I do not want your soup of eyes. I do not want your womb hung up in a tree, to give me persimmon-babies every fall. Come with me/go into this/and I will show you the place where monster and marrow and maiden/and meat and bile and voices/pool. Come away from this man who is/neither old nor ugly/young nor beautiful, and I will love you better than he/I will love you better than he. Be my soup of eyes, be my festival morning, let me drink you down with due reverence, let me press your irises against the roof of my/my mouth until their sweetness bursts into salt, and all will be well/I will be well/and all will be well, /and you will be well, /and all manner of things will be/well, in the dark, well and one.

I/I/do/I/I will/yes./yes.

You swallow like a child, milk-desperate.

II

YASUGI

Mother, Mother, I mourn.

I claw at the clay, the red furrows reek in the earth like kanji, ideograms of grief, need-glyphs. Mother, let me in, move aside the stones for me, for your poor boy who loves you. Mother, I cannot find the way down, I cannot find my way under the mountain—open a canyon for me, a cave, a door. Where are you? Why do you not answer your son?

If I kill a dragon for you, as heroes are wont to do, if I damp the soil with blood, will the stain become a gate, a hole, a passage into Mother, into the dreamed-of hell?

I am the only one who mourns her. The rest have all forgotten. And yet, and yet. Am I really her son? It is not an easy genealogy to parse—would she open the ground for me if I were not her son but a lover, a suitor, an ardent and earnest creature seeking only to lay his head on her knee? I walk in the woods like a wild innocent—could I not lure her out with this purity, worn on my breast like grass-plait?

Yasugi is a knobbled field spackled with huts, and clouds roam over it like clapping mollusks. Mt. Hiba dresses itself up in blasted rock, red as rusted blood and pitted like a crone’s breast—it protrudes, it leaks a sickly milk of clinging snow. I am tired—I am hungry. The soles of my feet refuse to harden, but bleed openly, crack, gape pale and womanish on the grass. I have asked at sake-houses and bath-houses and fish-and-rice-houses after the passage of a snake, a monster of any sort, even a particularly tall or lumpish man. They know nothing, they see nothing. They are so slow, so dull I can hardly stand to smell their breath, their bandaged thumbs—if my descent-body disgusts me, theirs buckles my legs with retching. If I were my right self I would bring the waves up, blue and black, over this whole valley and scrub it clean of their crawling and crying. They nibble the suckers off of white and fleshy stalks of squid, and suggest I go further south, to the city. They know everything in the city.

South, south, ever south.

The sun slaps my back as if it loathed me specially—which, of course, it does. What sister misses an opportunity to annoy her brother when he is least eager to be annoyed?