Free Myths of Origin by Catherynne M. Valente Page B

the sandwich-trees lately. Getting on in years and all.” The Grasshopper marched over to the crust I held in my hand and perched on the pad of muscle under my thumb, chewing daintily. After a time, she spoke again in her piping voice, this time to the monkey. “Poor little thing. Listen, and I will tell you something. We insects understand more than you, so big you miss nearly everything important. The Road does not end, everever. Count your steps and the sum will number redemption. Like me, walking on thread, you will learn; traversing a thing you Devour it, watching a thing you move it, conquering a thing you are eaten by it. Drink from a puddle, you are rain, grip a vine too tightly, you are a Monkey, crease the night with song, you are a cricket come morn. In another life I was a Wall, in another a Rabbit with organdy ears. It is all the same. I think I can recall that I liked having bricks for bellies.” The Grasshopper stopped, her tone thickening.
    “And you are being tracked by a very big Door. The leaves are shaking with his progress. This is the help I can offer you, from my warm soil-bed.”
    The Monkey frowned and gently lifted her from my hand. “I had heard his prowl, but I did not want to frighten her. Walk carefully, little sister, I have seen birds about,” he warned. The Grasshopper flushed pale.
    “Well enough, then. Goodbye, redwoman. Look down as you go, you will see more that way. Downdowndown.”
    She scurried away in a jitter of opalescence.

17
    The night swells up with visions, its regular chore.
    Oh, golden Monkey, darlinggold , Companion though I would have none, can you see it? Walk beside me and guard me against the marauding Doors, (and say what you will, I shall not be caught) but can you see ? The gold-skinned camels sluicing through the snow-crusted Road, their breath like pale puffing mushrooms in the grey air? Utterly confounded by the cold softness of this not-quite-sand, stamping in bewilderment and fear. Mercurial rivulets trickle from their wide footprints, and their muzzles crust over with a multitude of icicles. I can see, I can see them marching upwards, over the pass, packed with Bedouin blankets and tassels, humps swollen as for the first time they know water-plenty. Their trembling cries like blown glass, trying to be brave in the midst of all this terrifying whiteness. Poor animal, nothing is clear any longer, nowhere is home with beautiful gleaming dunes and a sky like liquefied diamonds. The heat that was your mother has fled and the idea of winter is slowly birthing Revelations of Ice in your chambered heart. The mirrored glacier is playing midwife to a shivering Apocrypha of Snow, written on your long scroll-tongue.
    Is it a (vision), is it hereandnow ? I could not say, I could not say. The men trudging beside their great woolly beasts, carrying woven leather leads covered in an elaborate wind chime of icicles. But in their left hands they hold a strange burden. Blue fingers drag in the snow, bruise the Road, covered in agate rings and hieroglyphics. Eyes show all whites, shimmering in perfection and exaltation, insensate and exalted, hecatombs rising in their lashes. They are carried by the rag-wrapped men, whose hands wrap tightly around the handles that protrude from bowed backs, black handles of painted glass, fused with flesh. Sublimity crackles in the places where slickness joins skin, that precious desert-mothered silicate sand scalded into clarity of form. Oh, where, where are they going?
    They are women, women converted into carryon luggage, their curved handles as lovely as their curved hips, such symmetry and style, these ascended seraphs scrawled all from brow to womb with the Scripture of Hoar Frost, lifted to the frozen peaks to deliver their in-spired, in-breathed, in-gested prose, each in a separate language. The First in Romanian, the Second in Portuguese, the Third in Breton, the Fourth in Phoenician, the Fifth in Zulu, the Sixth in Maori, and the