Free The Melancholy of Mechagirl by Catherynne M. Valente

dragon in her school Chinese New Year assembly, screamed and screamed.
    For a long while no one came to get her. She sank deeper and deeper into the concrete, for she was not a very big child, and soon it was up to her chest. She began to cry. What if I never get out? she thought. What if the street hardens and I have to stay here forever and eat meals here and read books here and sleep here under the moon at night? Would people come and pay a dollar to look at me? Will the rest of me turn to stone?
    The child science fiction writer thinks like this. It is the main reason she has few friends.
    She stayed in the ground for no more than a quarter of an hour—but in her memory it was all day, hours upon hours, and her father didn’t come until it was dark. Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girls are always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark.
    But her father did come to get her. A teacher saw the science fiction writer half buried in the road from an upper window of the school and called home. She remembers it like a movie—her father hooking his big hands under her arms and pulling, the sucking, popping sound of the earth giving her up, the grey streaks on her legs as he carried her to the car, grey as a dead thing dragged back up from the world beneath.
    The process of a child with green eyes becoming a science fiction writer is made of a number ( p ) of these kinds of events, one on top of the other, like layers of cellophane, clear and clinging and torn.
IX.
    In the golden pre-loop theory fields, Persephone danced, who was innocent of all gravitational law. A white crocus bloomed up from the observer plain, a pure cone of the causal future, and Persephone was captivated by it. As she reached down to pluck the p -brane flower, an intrusion of non-baryonic matter surged up from the depths and exerted his gravitational force upon her. Crying out, Persephone fell down into a singularity and vanished. Her mother, priestess of normal mass, grieved and quaked, and bade the lord of dark matter return her daughter who was light to the multiverse.
    Persephone did not love the non-baryonic universe. No matter how many rich axion-gifts he lay before her, Hades, King of Bent Waves, could not make her behave normally. Finally, in despair, he called on the vector boson called Hermes to pass between branes and take the wave /particle maiden away from him, back to the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker universe. Hermes breached the matter/antimatter boundary and found Persephone hiding herself in the chromodynamic garden, her mouth red with the juice of hadron-pomegranates. She had eaten six seeds and called them Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, and Bottom. At this, Hades laughed the laugh of unbroken supersymmetries. He said: She travels at a constant rate of speed and privileges no observer. She is not mine, but she is not yours . And in the end, there is nothing in creation which does not move.
    And so it was determined that the baryonic universe would love and keep her child, but that the dark fluid of the other planes would bend her slightly, always, pulling her inexorably and invisibly toward the other side of everything.
X.
    The science fiction writer left her husband slowly. The performance took ten years. In the worst of it, she felt that she had begun the process of leaving him on the day they met. First she left his house and went to live in Ohio instead, because Ohio is historically a healthy place for science fiction writers and also because she hoped he could not find her there. Second, she left his family, and that was the hardest, because families are designed to be difficult to leave, and she was sorry that her mother-in-law would stop loving her, and that her niece would never know her, and that she would probably never go back to California again without a pain like a nova blooming inside her. Third, she left his things—his clothes and his shoes and his smell and his books and his toothbrush and