Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,1

often have different goals with regard to the idea of narrative. Like writers, painters have a palette of colors to work with, which they then deploy to create a painting using brushstrokes. These brushstrokes are dictated by the types of brushes they use, and their personal approach to creating the brushstrokes. How they mix and layer the paint. The resulting image of a person will seem to exist independent of the brushstrokes, but it has no such autonomy: it is dependent on the use of charcoal rather than watercolor, oils rather than acrylics. In this regard, Valente demonstrated from the beginning of her career an ability to create very different effects within her lush style.

And if you are a writer like Valente, style doesn’t exist just in the syllable because style doesn’t encrust a story, form on top of it. Instead, style permeates. It inhabits. Here, in Myths of Origin, it exists in every meaning and derivation of the words, and in the hearts of her characters. This is a special kind of obsession, beautiful and true.

“And the book lay between us, bulging and dark, promising. The Fox retained her beatific face; I opened the cover with a careful hand and read these things.”

THE

LABYRINTH

THIS IS FOR YOU—THE BLAME IS YOURS.

WRITTEN ON YOUR SKIN

SPOKEN IN YOUR VOICE:

A GLAMOUR AND A LIE.

All that I know is contained in this book,

written without witness,

an edifice without dimension,

a city hanging in the sky.

—Anaïs Nin, House of Incest

A human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo—not only to himself but to the whole play and spectacle, and not only to a spectacle but at bottom to him who needs precisely this spectacle—and who makes it necessary because again and again he needs himself—and makes himself necessary—What? And this wouldn’t be—circulus vitiosus deus?

—Friedrich Nietzsche

CANTO

THE FIRST

1

Look closely. This is not the Way.

Up or down, I could not say, I could not say. I ate the severed halves of a Compass Rose seven-hundred-and-negative-eight miles back, covering the yellow red meat with lime skins and choking it down. Now it is Within. So I could not say northwest or south, only the veil-fire that way and the moon-forest this way, this turn or that turn, round the oleander Wall rippling underwater or over the mandrake Wall salivating on my hand as I execute a three-quarters pike half-caffeinated flip over its thick shoulders. My body is bound with guitar strings, nipples like fawn’s hooves strumming E minor chords and finger-picking a Path through resonant briars, redolent of the desert bellies of blue lizards. By now my feet are worn through, holes like mouths gaping and smacking in cathedral soles, pounding, thrusting on the Path like a drum-skin stretched into incandescence, finding that old comfortable rhythm that by now I know so well, that I invented out of dust and the sweat beading prettily on my own calves.

It is all familiar now, after the passage of constellations and the ingestion of the Compass Rose, holding now that flaming cross inside me, in this sign thou shalt conquer, north-brow south-hips east-wrist west-thigh, in this sign thou shalt walk until the end of days, in this sign thou shalt blaze and burn, in this sign thou shalt stride tall through this Place, this happy Garden of Lies, in this sign thou shalt eat berries and lie under the moon, and let it tan your skin silver.

I carry Direction inside me like a child, a watery infant daughter of a circuit of dawns, connected by the fibrous strength of my spinal fluid and thread sun from the enamel of my teeth. She, in all her diamond gills and sunfish fins is anchored in my rich belly, wrapping her precious little Compass-form in my umbilicus like a mummy, and so I am her sarcophagus, too. Her mother and her coffin.

And the directions never change, magnetic north is always at the crown of my mercurial head, south always at the arch of my holy foot, for I carry the Rose within, growing like a Vedic moon. O serpentine I, having a tail fat with scales linked like opaline chain mail, and thus no way to give birth to this precise little cat-child, kept inside an adamant muscle wall. It pushes against my ribcage, stretching the skin of my lifting belly. Amphibious and infertile, webbed into frozen fecundity, Great-With-Child, never