And so I went out from that first river, that first knot of grass.
Behind my heels trailed wisps of grey sea-fog, curling into the summer air like ink dissolving into water.
EIGHT
Call me Monster.
I am exactly as you imagine I will be. Green on black on green on black, whicker-snack in the dark, slapping binary scales—greenblackgreengreengreenblack—against cavern-aurochs, against shaggy reindeer and whizzing arrows and cicadas like wet brown seeds, against walls, always walls, caves within caves upon caves, against granite, basalt, maiden.
I am Eight. We are Eight. Lying on my side, if you prefer the symbolism. Eight heads, eight tails, eight snakes susurring against each other like auto-asphyxiating lovers, joined at the torso—circus grotesque, unseparated octuplets in a jar of formaldehyde, jumbled trunk a snaggletoothed muscle with the brawn of a circus strongman, and all the bells ringing, ringing, ringing in the gloam. Eight-all-together rattle eight diamond heads, heavy and flat, a clutch of serpent-castanets, and oh, the music I-and-we make, music for the maidens, music for the midden we made of our caves, music for the bones, the old ro
lled bones, rooster bones and buffalo bones and fox bones and tigress bones, bones like bellows and bones like cudgels, bones like whistles and bones like pillows.
Oh, the music, oh, the bed of bones.
I eat light, vomit scripture. Eat maiden; retch hymn. Eat hero; hawk meadhall. The natural reptilian digestion is alchemical: eight chambered stomachs bubbling like beakers, intestines looping between, above and below, logos-calligraphy whispering recipes between celestial spheres swollen with bile and flesh. Our body is proto-Ptolemaic, constructed all of hoops and circles, perfect circles, without beginning or end—mouth, eye, neck-elongate, poison-sac, egg. We swim in ourselves, we chew our tails, we exude diamond-slime and drink it from puddles in the pocked cavefloor, our every process is filthy with beatitude, we are exalted by excrement, transfigured by mucus-mandala. We have to eat, after all.
You will, no doubt, see us and cry: It is a snake, and horrible to see.
This is because your processes are redundant, revolting—eat maiden; shit sludge.
But we are witch-doctors, we are medicine, and all around us the maidens waver like ghosts chained to a lakefloor, coronal, illuminate, perfected into daughters of my flesh (greenblackgreengreenblack) breech-angled, nestled in the sandy soil of our tapering body. We carry them like daughters-strapped-to-the-back, we drag them along like sacks of corn, corn-women, gone down into darkness and up again, down again and up again, and there is no asphodel like the cilia of our viscera, there is no pomegranate like our colossal heart, sixteen-chambered, ventricles lines in white fiber, seeded in bloody rubies, slowly erupting, slowly retreating.
That there were eight of them you might call providential, if you believe in that sort of thing-but I don’t imagine you do. What use is providence to a god? Of course, tradition demands seven only, seven brides for seven brothers, seven maids for seven monsters. But Kushinada, Kushinada, she was the false Pleiad, the Eighth, and her hair was so black. I am not ashamed—her sisters cried out for her in their cradles of snakemeat, the Eight-all-together ululated in our stony crèche, we all beat the earth with our bodies and ate up her name in her absence: Kushinada, Kushinada!
Family wants family, and I have all these mouths to feed.
Seven-eighths is no good; we want the whole set, perfect little dolls lined up in a row, and how pretty their birthday-obi gleam in the filtered algaelight this cave allows. She sits with her legs crossed on the mound of bones, sits like a student doing sums, and looks up at us, at the wallowing serpent, the slime and sere, the strange sister-shapes moving beneath the un-molt. We make this tableau each morning after breakfast, girl and creature, primate and reptile, evolution in miniature, titans terrible in contemplation of our splendor.
Every evening after tea, she pulls a scale from my throat, great and clear as a shaving from the emerald at the heart of the world, and with delicate lips—pink, so pink!—she nibbles at it, cake-sweet and swarthy with the taste of trees, and swallows with relish. I do not know yet what she can make of me in that strange pale oven of her body—much, I suppose, depends on it, but I-and-we are patient; love makes us so. This is the school of snakes, and she is my best pupil yet.
You recoil, but you can’t deny it’s compelling—this folkloric blueprint, handprint, angel in the snow, and oh, I certainly could not have made such a shape, not with these whips and flails, tongues and tails. You must have done it; any angel of mine would be an oceanic horror, waving its unspeakable heads at a punctured moon. This has arms, legs, an anatomy so simple and profound you cannot even recognize it as a single body: snake, cave, virgin.
It is your prurient nature which makes such things into miasma, it is you who holds up a glass and views her and I, our stainless acts, through the darkly of your clutching, it is you who lie on the grassy floor, redolent with oil and full of someone else’s food, and tell the mustachioed man-god-father that you dream, you dream of the great eight-headed phallus looming over—is she smiling or screaming?—a schoolgirl in her best dress.
You dream of the cave’s moss-veiled crevice, and the girl vanishing into it, and the snake vanishing into her, around and around and around, and you do not know why it reminds you of your mother.
Look at your angel in the ice, arms fanned out like spying stares.
It has your stink all over it.
I
HOKI
Walking is unpleasant. The muscles of my calves bunch new and raw like fundoshi, and my toes are flattening with use.
It is undignified.
My throat forces me to stop and soothe it at filthy wells lined in algae as thick as under-robes, but the water only runs out of me again, oily, seeping up through my skin like ink through rice paper.
I have had to piss several times; sour steam rises from the wet grass. The whole business is revolting.
Prefectural monks rub their heads furiously when I pass—they have not heard of the dragon, certainly such a blight would not befall their villages, blessed as they are of the Kami (and if I were in my right state I would haul seven or so typhoons from my left pocket to splash away those smug, simpering smiles—oh how I miss my limbs of thrashing palm trees and splintering camphor!) but they are assuredly grieved that the poor family of Kushinada, whose hair even here they have heard was as dark as ink pooled in the belly of a crow, should be made to suffer so.
Give me rice, brainless holy, and get back to your kneeling—the sun does love to see you scrape. As for me, my stomach will not shut up, and wants fish. It is not used to itself—ridiculous sack of meat which is always too empty for its own liking. I once had innards of pure light, intestines that served only to translate wind to sky. Where did the other body go when I fell from the floor of my sister’s house? Is it caught in the clouds, in the slats of her golden tatami, light tangled up in light? I want it back, I want my storm-tongue and my oceanic muscles, unfolding like wings, black on blue on silver—she cannot have it, she has no right to keep it from me and leave me with only this stinking, mewling flesh dripping its slime over the earth like sacraments—why cannot I wring my hands and be rid of it as I would any other putrid mire?
The bitch always stole my things.