Myths of Origin by Catherynne M. Valente

Author:Catherynne M. Valente [Valente, Catherynne M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, novel, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781890464165
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2011-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

FIRST HEAD

I am the first body/daughter./

The name my lower intestine whispers/the sound of the taste of myself on a tongue mine/not mine/is Kazuyo. I was born first of eight burdens under brittle stars/my throat emerged first of eight gullets from the mother-dark-and-wet when the sleeve-stars were high/and a roof of thatched cypress bark.

It is quiet in the length. My cells are/its cells/are my cells/are its/cells are my cells/my cells my own/its/mine. Meat on /meat /I am translated, child into serpent/worm.

When I was myself/when I was myself and did not hold a girl in me like a steel pin in my hip/and did not wear a coat of monster, I lived in a village, in a house, and the mats on my floor were neither thin nor fat. I was born in winter, in the dead days after the last snowfall but before the ice of the air shows any crack. I was a small infant, blue in the face and hung like a criminal from my mother’s womb by the noosed length of my own umbilicus. My mother said later that it looked like a shell-less snail lying over my tiny neck. And like a weed-stuffed garden pest, it was cut and thrown onto the refuse heap, its silver scrap reflecting the moon as though it too was pregnant, swollen with light it was meant to have delivered into my little navel.

And so I was born without the light I ought to have owned, with a stomach curiously empty from the first moment I drew ragged, gap-ridden breath. The earth ate it, slowly, with teeth of grass and stone. In years hence a persimmon tree grew out of that heap of cast-offs, and we re-planted the 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

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