Free Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente Page B

nothing but more sleeves and brume, but he is both a swimmer and a maker of keys, and he knows how to fit himself into gaps too small for others. He cannot stay in the wreck of Gabriel’s disapproval, and the night is almost done. Oleg holds his breath and dives blade-first: he falls and falls, so far.
    _______
    In a train station, a woman with blue hair is suddenly dizzy; on a street of cedar, a beekeeper in a long dress sneezes as her nose fills with wool.
    _______
    There is a river flowing beneath the street of coats, a river the color of milk. It is slow and thick, rolling in long, lugubrious currents of cream and curdle. There is a flannel sky over it, and a long brick tunnel overgrown with golden moss and flabby, half-translucent mushrooms, slick and silver, like the flesh of oysters. It has fallen through in places, and Oleg has fallen through the places.
    He walks along the bank, a crumbling, ornate rill carved with lamenting faces whose tears feed the river. Their mouths contort, their eyes plead, and they pass by unmarked beneath his feet. He limps, and this disturbs him, for in dreams does not one fall painlessly, like a sigh?
    There is a bench, one of those that seem, wherever they are, that they ought to have been in Paris, with a view of the Seine. There is a woman sitting there in a long dress, watching the mushrooms flutter. As he draws closer, the dress becomes deeply blue, spattered with silver stars. It is formal; it has a bustle like the base of a cupola. Her hair is wild and loose, though, mouse-colored, very like his own, and strung through with snow, though no flakes fall underground. She turns to face him and he groans; the mushrooms recoil.
    “I missed you, Olezhka,” says his sister, and holds out her long arms.

FOUR
    T HE A RCHIPELAGO
    L ucia was gone.
    Ludovico sat naked in his hall, cross-legged, as if to be shriven. The Etymologiae flowed up the walls around him: Lucia’s breadcrumbs, all raven-devoured, and he the child left behind in the wood. He touched them, the tiny grooves in the paint, places where she had been, where her fingers had moved. If he closed his eyes he could dwell in the circuit of air that had once held her, he could hold his breath and be inside her again, within the close and burning borders of her—she stood here, washed her hair in this sink, wrote upon this wall, ate roasted chicken at this table. There was no place he could enter where she had not also been, her echoes hanging in the air like pages hung to dry. No place that did not suppurate in her absence, which was not ringed with the light of her old selves, like film burned with a cigarette.
    He could smell her leonine scent in their bed, and would still, even weeks after she had slept there. He could not bear to sleep where she had, to ruin the imperceptible outline of her body, which was surely now only a fevered hope and a lie of unwashed linens. Her laugh, harsh and cruel and short, hung like garlands of blackened roses by the long, thin windows. He had hardly eaten but to put his teeth to the bones she had left on a chipped plate in the kitchen, to fit his mouth to a dead thing she had once worried.
    Ludo pressed his cheek to the wall, and the letters warmed beneath him like her shoulders in winter: Cum leones dormierint, vigilant oculi; cum ambulant, cauda sua cooperiunt vestigial sua, ne eos venator inveniat … the words bent the corner sharply, winding on past the telephone table with its slender green lamp. When lions sleep, their eyes are ever watchful, and when they walk, they obliterate their tracks with their tails so that the hunter may not find them …
    Ludo dug his nails into leones , into ambulant , as if to unearth from them her face, her stride, her long golden tail brushing paw prints from the scrub-dust.
    They had always been beasts, curled and snarling in their cave, intractable, invidious. Of course they had, chimera and saint—but hadn’t they made their monstrous contract, hadn’t