Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Hic monstra delitescunt. Sed puella, puella, ubi abscondes?”

  Voice like a rustling of linden leaves, like sand becoming a pearl. My hand fluttered to my mouth in terror, hiding the shameful whiteness of my lips. She sat on a Wall of salmon scales, which clinked and jingled as she turned her perfect face towards me, eyes full of hawk’s claws. Her wings reached back over the crest of the Wall and nearly brushed the ground, arched and pointed, of feathered ice and lapis lazuli. Her body covered in a skin of milky opals, clinging to her breasts and belly, her long arms and her bare feet. I could not speak. My blank statue-eyes were helpless, could offer nothing to her beauty. In her hands a slim rod of ash and spider-thread, she was fishing in the Road, a hole cut in the ice of a left-hand turn. An Angel of Ice-Fishing. She was smoking a long reed pipe, tobacco that smelt of cranberries and elephant-skin. And hauling trout from the Road in great silver heaps, flopping beside her on the Wall. Some leapt ecstatically towards her, not waiting for the line and bait.

  I climbed up, clumsy and strange in my lightbody, full of cold and slowness. In the mountains of fish I found a resting place, leaning against the marine brickwork. Amid a corona of smoke she pressed the rod-end into a crack in the Wall. The fish still threw themselves at her opaline body, eyes full of her form. She curled her lips into

  “Hic monstra delitescunt, cara.”

  I looked up into her and choked, “You speak the language of the Doors!”

  She breathed her jungle tobacco into my pale mouth. “Yes,” she hissed, “Do you think perhaps I am a Door?”

  I could not answer, tongue thick in my bloodless mouth. The Angel leaned into me, cold radiating from her owl-skin. She began to draw on my papery flesh in stark black chalk on my belly and lunar, heavy breasts. Her finger was cold.

  “The key to catching trout is the lure,” she intoned throatily, tracing a horse-shape on my thigh. “Today they are biting on dragonflies smeared in my blood.” She exhales, long and critically, editorializing her drawing with smoke-rings. She began on a spiraling snake, just below my left shoulder. “Tomorrow it will be roasted cicadas. They are fickle.”

  “Sometimes I am a cicada, hissing and singing in the leaves of a tree by the sunlit water, thoughtless and wordless, a voice that is all consonants and tribal clicks. Sometimes I rub my legs together like a string bass, and the lake quivers.” She listened intently to me, as if diagnosing a tumor hiding in my voice.

  Slowly she took possession of me through the figures; 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 into the night.

  7

  Despair.

  I am blind. Still in my statue-eyes I die in my steps blooming red and black. The glyphbody flies apart, together. The Stone burns all through me. Talmudic Walls rise, recede. I dive, I dart, I runrunrun. I know the way to away and away. Infatuated by motion my feet make love to dirt, couple with jeweled stones full of corrosive oxygenblood, death of a thousand cuts executed on my own human haunches, never running fast enough to escape the threat of Purpose/non-Purpose. The Mazescape sloughs off its icy corselet as I scramble from the Angel’s shade, but still I am the wasteland, white within white. Whales hunt for fat seals across the icy expanse of my torso, wolves gnaw at my ears. My septum is pierced with a barbed harpoon. I shudder in my own cold, watching my lips turn cream-blue, reflected endlessly in the glaciers of my transparent fingers. I am snow, I am stone, I am wind. I hollow myself to make shelter, scooping out shovelfuls of slush from my stomach, my thighs, my skull. I break open, holding this body together with screams. Perhaps when it is done I can crawl within the now-palace of stretched skin over the frame of icicles and become warm. Perhaps I will understand.Careening, pinwheel stride around a cul-de-sac, I kneel before a crumbling Wall—perhaps with bricklaid eyes it saw the birth of the Labyrinth in the longestago, squeezed from the womb of some unutterable hundred-armed Ionic bear-goddess with screaming eyes, covered in slime and dust, shooting its arms out into geometric monstrosity, eating worlds to make its new limbs and mouths and voices, fulminating in the shadow of gargantua, suckling at its mother’s shaggy body until she died—

  I push its broken bricks back into the Wallbody, weeping with mortar of tears and saliva, fingernails torn and leaking white liquid,
blood of pulverized moonstone flowing through me burning, burning, burning, the witch on the platform of my diaphragm, flames shooting from her mouth into my veins. Everything is fire. I grapple at the broken rock and dust, cramming it into my colorless mouth, crushing it into nothing, tasting the sour pencil-lead and hashish flavor of it, the gore of an ageing Wall, muddy intestines spilled out onto the careless Road into my careless belly. In, in, in, the tawny supper of clay, salted by manic tears, through the mash of dirt crowding I speak in tongues; Door-tongues, Hare-tongues, Sky-tongues, Trout-tongues, sordid demon-tongues, flower-tongues, snake-tongues like nooses, tobacco-tongues and belly-tongues, darkbody-tongues and white-eyed tongues, reptile-tongues and black wine-tongues, girl-tongues and foot-tongues, pummeling tongues of non-being and cadaverous tongues of lunatic frogs, O blasphemy, blasphemy in my tongue of tongues with the Wall dribbling out the sides of my wretched mouth. O holy Meal of Myself, Queen of the Center-that-is-not, babbling up at staircases that lead everywherenowhere, monoliths gawking at the clowning moon.

  Exploding frenetic devourer, I eat the Labyrinth and it eats me, each grinning with stringy meat dangling like earrings from a hungry mouth. Conquering, driving it before me through my body, chasing it, knowing that time will come for the kill, screaming into it, filling the world with a rape of sound. O send out your Doors and I will splinter them! Sacred gibberish of Maze oracles too full of self, Road blasting through my abdomen like a cannonball, paving me flat, pushing, pushing, forward motion, reversal verboten, it is one-way, the Way of Tongues, the Way of Body, the Way of the After-Seeker. Breathe, breathe, lungs, or the Wall will strangle you like a criminal. And so I draw a rasping, shearing breath, inhaling the revelatory dust into my fishy pink lungs, maidenhair cilia, exchanging air for earth. Elementals dance in trapezoidal patterns, and always within. I will not yield, I will not let the Labyrinth trap me into belonging. I have eaten it, as I ate the compass rose, and it sits in my belly like a thrashing mollusk, throwing out the shrapnel of its hydrochloric shell into my stomach-lining, into my howling womb Walls, into the deeps of my secret throats. Of all those infinite thousands of tentacled Maze-arms I have one fleshly sucker within me, a grisly victory. In the sign of this body thou shalt conquer, thou shalt slash and rend flesh, thou shalt Devour for it is thy nature, to Devour what is Sought. I am I, and no other. On my lips the Wall disintegrates, on my lips it dies. I refuse. I refuse these mewling seductions. I am I. I move within the Labyrinth, and it moves within me. If there is madness to be swallowed, I will swallow it. But for the crashing chariots of Purpose I cannot halt.

  8

  I whittle the waxen surface of Time.

  White crows cackle at the blackening dawn. Dewy air finds me curled in the wreckage of the Wall, liquid light hair streaming into the sky like a cloud of gangrenous butterflies. The morning so thick in my mouth, the pulverized brick on my tongue, ancient mortar like congealed vodka pouting at my uvula. Vagaries of the morning after paroxysm, ache of jaws recently frantic. (I contain an abundance of whiteness.) Still shivering in copious plagues. Penumbral lacerations and ruins of hallowed sylph-hips. I lie here, pressed down into the ground, unable to move, to pry open painted eyes and coerce action from opiate corporeality. Float in the dark, girl-creature, it isn’t the sun on your limbs, it is the fire. Is there a tree heavy with peaches for your breakfast, waiting fat and friendly and golden outside the body barrier you cower in? Arboreal messiah, full of sugary seraphim, the grails of pitted cores? No, there is dust. Outside you, inside you. Dust. Toothless sky gumming your fingers like a grandmother.

  I move. I have to. I am—there is no tree adjacent, of course. It would have been too docile, for the Road to have twisted and turned to serve my belly and its cat-howl, scowling empty. But it does not take long, no longer than a half-sliver of silver sun-glide, to locate a copse of cold green fruit trees. Under all juice flows down my lips, running the pigment of the Angel’s art like watercolors. Impressionist, I stand tall and still within the sky-armed trees.

  What remains when fire has filled the viscera and vanished? The oily tracks of naphtha, steaming black arteries, barren metallic smoke-smell, liver glazed like a vase, glossy and intricate. The lungs are blazed to crystal, and the long necklaces of veins strung with gleaming ligaments, each capillary popping clear of the flesh like a carnelian bead. What is left when the grimy veil of delirium has passed, with its greasy flames of green and blue? The Void, the Void only, that is the Labyrinth and that is I. When it is over, we remain, as we have alwaysbeen. The Others are ripples.

  But I am troubled, I am haunted. Function, meaning pry at me like hungry children. There is power here, in my place within the life of the Maze. I am a terrible whirlwind, the eater of cities, but I choke on my own clouds and skirts of dust, my long ropes of sand. Wild roses on the Wallface, and the Void giggling under a veil of waving carpets of summer grass. And I, burning, falling, raw as bark-stripped pine. There is no sound where I step, for I am not really here, this shadow is not mine, I swear to myself that I am more than this, that transcendence exists somewhere, and a secret avalanche far off rumbles like the clearing of a diamond throat.

  I am tired.

  9

  Whither and how. Shall I go on?

  Do I dare to crawl on my belly through this pilgrimage of grass and earth? A pilgrimage with no Rapture at its dread terminus? Wear my knees to inkwells over endless Paths. Shaken by the spidery intrusions of words like snaking belladonna, I am not so firmly forward moving as I was. The clouds are threatening admirals, dusted in golden medals of sunlight. I have not heard the shuffling gait of a Door on my trail in days. It is strange, the ineffable silence. Do they no longer want me? Has my smell become less delectable in their nostril/keyholes? All around is barren, Walls of bare copper wire and a scalded Road, and I am the most blasted acre of this waste. I have seen scurryings in the corners, I have heard scratching feet. Yesterday a thrush shook its wings of rain nearby. But it would not speak to me, it turned its little brown back. I am verboten, nameless, null. There is a sliver in the pad of my ring finger, the reliquary of my own flesh cradling a breath of ash, tinged in blood and vinegar from lips of sorrowful countenance. In my earlobes thorns, my eyelids draped in shrouds with the imprints of a thousands faces emblazoned in sweat, a spear entering my mouth and piercing my skull at its base, obsidian arrowhead dripping in liquefied faux diamonds, the viscous substance that pools in my brain pan and slides from the edges of the wound, thick with hieroglyphic ideation and the terribly worrying diagnosis of blood-poisoning. Oh, yes, I feel it already, marching through the byways with alkaline toes. Sad to think I am so streaked in squid-ink poverty that I cannot even be devoured properly. She was right. I do not know my name. But. I accept.

  A sound fractured the air, behind a Wall of diamond and boiling pitch, spilling onto the Road in a writhing swamp-hand, reaching, reaching. My scalded eyes rolled like slot machines, pivoting to follow, sliding to wrap the molten corners. I was not ready, not ready for another thing to disturb my madness, growing like a favored son in me. I could almost see its source, spy with my little eye—

  “A MAN!” it cried out, voice bleeding gasoline, slow and egg-runny, wriggling towards me.

  “WALKS!”

  And I could see it then, scaled knee sunk into the pitch, mouth gaping like a cellar Door. A swath of green hyphenating the Doorscape, glittering coldly and savagely in the brittle sun, still slick with the waters of some distant marsh. His great tail slapped the air, thumped the earth with enthusiasm and abandon as he, a monstrous Crocodile, clacked his feral jaw and winked, launching full force into his sermon, quivering in every green claw, gesturing with fat scaled fingers.

  “A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR! Hallelujah, child, hallelujah, I say! Say it up and say it down, say it east and say it west, say it diagonal, child, say it out loud! A MAN! WALKS INTO! A BAR! A! MAN WALKS! INTO A! BAR! A! MAN! WALKS! INTO! A! BAR! AMAN, child, sing it, AMEN, glory on high, walks into a bar, and do he
ever walk tall! A man walks into a bar, my child, do you hear what I say? He walks and he walks slow, he walks like paint drying, my friend, but he walks straight up to that bar and it’ll only be the best brand for this one with his five-day-beard and better-day-seen jeans! Oh, yes, girl, surely so, a man walks into a bar and don’t he have the look of a union man, don’t he have the look of coffee and cigarette break on the hour every hour, don’t he look like our kind of boy! Oh, pour him that double shot! Pour him that twelve-year old brand name! How many apostles on that holy mount, my child? Oh, yes, my girl! There were twelve! Can I get an AMEN? Oh, pour him that apostle-scotch, barman, pour that drink! A man walks into a bar, holy holy, holy! Oh, he walks long and he walks strong and don’t he walk grand, like a boot-barrel man should, and ain’t that cigarette in his mouth just as white as your mama’s wash-day, child, and don’t that smoke rise up? Oh, way up high it’s said that men they don’t walk but fly but oh, my child, I say unto you that that man walked into a bar and he drank that whiskey down! Say it high and say it low but in he walked and lay his money down, in he walked and sat on that red vinyl, in he walked and tipped that barman five dollars, hallelujah, child, five dollars! And ain’t that green bill crisp, friends and neighbors, ain’t it brand new, ain’t it mint? A man walks into a bar, in his holy name, and it is nigh on last call but he lays his money down, he lays it down and drinks it down and ain’t that just fine? Ain’t that right as rain?”

  I arched a kindergarten-paste eyebrow like a flying buttress. The Crocodile stamped his feet joyfully, splashing my ankles with black grime. His eyes glowed like pools of crude oil.

  “Do you hear me, girl? Do you get what I’m saying? Can you grab hold and swing it around? Can you feel it in your teeth? Can you grasp the sublime and angelic perfection of the Gospel of the Man and the Bar?”