Myths of Origin

I-within-Ayako could not breathe. I could not move. Tears rushed from my eyes like a spring from a rock wall, streaming down my cheeks, mixing with sweat and grime from the climb up onto the creaking floor of the third level. My throat was a boulder against a tomb, my limbs a sudden dark wax, flooding into each other, under and around the radiance of the stone figure. I could not think. My mind was empty of everything but it, even the dreams, even the dreams.

Its face, luminous and round as all the suns I have ever known, stared out, beatific, sorrowing, without eyes or mouth. The sorrow penetrated me like a hand, holding my heart, holding all of me that can be moved by beauty, holding me like the mother that died, spilling over with forgiveness. Nothing I had ever done or been or imagined myself mattered, only this ancient stone whose name I could not begin to guess. What god had it been meant to show? I did not know, could not know, but for a slow blink of the sun’s eye, it erased every shadow I had dragged behind me like a tawdry merchant’s cart, its one broken hand gracefully bent into a mudra of seraphic gentleness.

It made me a child in braids and a poor dress, crawling into my mother’s lap and pressing my face into her warm skin. I sobbed against her, my bones cracking open and my deepest blood pouring over her absolving hands. I died away from the dreams. I and the stone were the whole universe, for a moment that stretched out in all directions, an infinite plane of liquid jewels, she was all things, and the smooth gray of its faded eyelids filled my vision with a great burning. All of me was on fire, incandescent, my legs, my mouth, my tears searing as they coursed, rivers of naphtha scalding and cleansing. It was inside me, purging me of all that was not light. I was made of gold, singular, my skin kindled and blazed, I saw nothing at all before me but endless plains of its light and mine flooding together like tributary and river, river and sea.

“Stone,” I wept, my face swollen with tears, “tell me a lesson about myself.”

Stone considered for a moment, and began.

Cicadas Begin to Sing

The cicada lies in the earth for seventeen years. It is warm and dark there, it is soft and wet. Its little legs curl underneath it, and twitch only once in a little while. What does the cicada dream when it is folded into the soil? What visions travel through it, like snow flying fast? Its dreams are lightless and secret. It dreams of the leaves it will taste, it composes the concerto it will sing to its mate. It dreams of the shells it will leave behind, like self-portraits. All its dreams are drawn in amber. It dreams of all the children it will make.

And then it emerges from the earth, shaking dust and damp soil from its skin. It knows nothing but its own passion to ascend—it climbs a high stalk of grass and begins to sing, its special concerto to draw the wing-pattern of its beloved near. And as it sings it leaves its amber skin behind, so that in the end, it has sung itself into a new body in which it will mate, and die.

The cicadas leave their shells everywhere, like a child’s lost buttons. The shells do not understand the mating dance that now occurs in the mountains above it. The shell knows nothing of who it has been, it does not remember the dreaming self, that was warm in the earth. The song emptied it, and now it simply waits for the wind or the rain to carry it away.

You are the cicada-in-the-earth. You are the shell-in-the-grass. You do not understand what you dream, only that you dream. And when you begin to sing, the song will separate you from your many skins.

This is the lesson of the cicada’s dream.

Bindweed Flourishes

I dream that my wrists are bleeding. Mountain spat basalt and bound them. River discovered the village was missing and in his rage tore open the walls of my womb. It lies gaping and red, the marks of his fingers black and terrible. My womb is screaming and they call it music. River says that I am beautiful now. That he will cut more of me open to reveal such beauty. He is planning an expedition to sound the depth of my spinal fluid.

I have had to release my storm clouds and let the oceans lighten. Mountain crushed me under his weight until I yielded. He ground into me grinning and panting. They have poured the foundation of their Palace directly into my throat—mortar and burning pitch, and no I have no voice but the mute growling of my deepest mouth.

I dream that it never ends. There are so many hands inside me now, rummaging in my flesh as though it were an attic. I am vandalized.

They are almost ready to begin the painting of the History in the first Great Hall. I cry silently as they balance the jade vat on the hollow of my throat. River holds the pen as he held my arms, and when he lays it down to rest, I can see it bears the same bruises.

My jaw is broken. The Palace was too large and the first gables shattered the bone. My teeth were scattered like seeds. The vi

llagers scurried to gather them up and return them to River, their rightful owner. But now it will be perfect, and the blood that drips from my earlobe can be used as paint. There is, after all, no sense in waste.

River has only just finished the inscription of their names. That was his proudest task, and it took a long time.

Hot Winds Arrive

I stayed with the statue as long as my belly would allow. The Ayako-body is demanding, however, and soon enough I did not wish to disturb it with the growls of hunger. I descended in sorrow, not knowing if I would have the strength to climb so high again.

I devoured a mash of wild carrots, beans, and mushrooms; I pulled down ripe plums from the branches heavy with green. Mountain provides. The dream-pagoda was inside me then, a bone like any other, and I confess that I had already begun to think on the fourth floor, though I knew my mewling flesh to be to weak to attempt it.

River washed me clean of tears and sweat and blood and dirt. He held me very tenderly in his current, as if I would break into five thousand pieces and float out to the sea. But I did not speak to him, though I could feel his disappointment at not being asked for a lesson in the summer, when he is at his best. River is such a proud creature. He loves display. He had an affair with Moon once, because she shone so prettily on his waters that he fell in love with her. It ended badly.

I had nothing to ask him, my eyes had glazed over like gray water. He became sullen and his banks pouted. I thought of the Stone and how its face had vanished. If none one sees a face, perhaps it is as good as vanished. Perhaps I have no face, either.

The sunlight was thick and hot, pooling on the earth like coils of molten lead. It sat heavily on my eyelids and began its long work of darkening my skin. Off in the Mountain-cliffs, the first cicadas open their amber throats and start to sing, their scream of ecstasy wrapping the air in a soprano fist.

Crickets Come Into the Walls

I dream that I can smell his flesh in the cinnamon-breath of camphor trees. I dream it stops up my nostrils like the spices of the dead. I am mummified by him, each sliver I find takes its correspondent from me.

It is his cheekbone, after all, still hanging with skin and blood like a curtain, drizzling fluid onto my skin. It reeks of river-waste, of rotting crocodile. And yet, I hold his face in my hands again, the high arc of his noble bone-structure, beauty being the mark of divinity.

I dream that the smell of his divinity gags me.

The rains are coming and then it will be harder. His slick-sided flesh will slip from my hands and into the mud-which-swallows. He is my dream-beast, the brother-husband vivisected, the body which was whole now in wet clumps, like hair from a woman’s brush. And the smell of it, embalming my body to drag it down with him into the satori of dismemberment. I am clay, and his fingers worm their bony lengths into the cracks of my joints, each part of him seeking its mate, but only its mate, having no care for the whole. His cheekbone calls out to mine, begging cartilage to rip from the wicked face.