Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,98

here, in the house of the gods, and beloved.”

“That is not what I mean,” I answered gruffly, clutching my chopstick as if to break it.

“What else could you have meant?” Their clean, white smiles did not falter. They did not know me, my blood chortled—rice-gobbling peasants know me by sight, but men trained to worship my kneecaps cannot recognize their god when he walks through their door. This is useless, said the blood, useless and comical, if it were not pathetic.

“I think you do not know half so much as your statues,” I sighed.

“Most likely,” they agreed heartily, “this temple is dedicated to Susanoo-no-Mikoto, Storm-God and Deathshead. It was he who came last from the nose of Izanagi in the beginning of the world, when the Great Father had finally rid himself of the foul dust which emanated from the body of the witch Izanami, who dared speak—”

I would like to say I did not bellow like an ox in heat, that I did not lurch out of my cushion through the scented air and smear rice and salt-plum into the noses and down the throats of the monks, just to shut them up, to stop up their stinking breath, greased with lies, that I did not screech my mother’s holy name while I tore at their sun-colored robes, shredded their ridiculous hats, claw at their soggy skin, skin that already smelled of death, of putrefaction and again, again, of lies, that I did not rip the cat-gut that strung together their looping beads, and laugh when the pebbles clattered onto the floor like rain falling on copper rooftops.

I would like to say these things.

But under the gleaming, muscled knees of that awful statue of myself I bound them with what prayer-twine were left, back to back in a ring like soldiers in the grass, and panting, seething, sweating salt through these meat-pores I never asked to own, I began to read those fools, those orange-swathed ant-farming fools, I began to read to them their lessons under the tamarind trees throwing up their branches into the black-bustling sky like frenzied arms. Did they quail? I did not look, I did not care. No one listens to me, but these mouse-eared men would. If it is possible for a god to be filled with the evangelic, I boiled over, and they were the scalded stove, and they would hear, they would hear me, or I would open them up and spit scripture into their grinning throats.

“Listen to me, listen to me when I tell you: this is how it was in the beginning of the world—”

SECOND HEAD

Men, even gods-in-men’s-skin, believe passion means (to adore, to lust, to be exalted through love.) They are foolish. Passion means to suffer. It means (to endure great sorrows.) Passion is the grasp of blister-ridden hands, breaking its thumbnails on the floor of heaven. (Passion is fear, like a peach tree planted in the navel, when your sister comes not wandering back over the cicada-emboldened hills.) It is hoarse, needling, the great iron vat in which flesh becomes oil. (It is eyes floating in murk, eyes crusted in salt like tears.) Its pelt is deep-shaded, like love—red and black, wine-dregs and sour mash—but it is (not) love. (But then, then you said it was, when you opened for me.) Passion cannot weep. The tracks of once-liquid sorrows run down its face, jaundiced and leprose-rose, a warm line of marrow-dust pooling on its collarbone like the burst bow of a violin. (Passion cannot weep, but oh, oh, it cries!) Passion hollows bones to flutes and seeds the flesh with baobabs, baobabs and women like baobabs, dark and deep in the muscle walls, growing like recalcitrant children, gnashing their agate teeth at intestines of twisted ivory. (I gnash, you gnash, we gnash at each other and eat each other and swallow and excrete each other and look at our passion, look how it gleams, look at the peachstones of our suffering in these caves!)

I am the second body (daughter.)

Quiet, quiet, second children do not speak. The neck behind the neck of the primary tongue is less than nothing, less than scale, less than true (less than true, less than firstborn, but I never understand you) myself (when you) we (are like this, old snake.)

I pat my belly and you are within it, second daughter (second sister, second length of ropy emerald musculature) and your name is embossed on my innards like the brand on an iron kettle. There