The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [30]
After the yellow crown was quite ruined in the mud by the laughing, eager thrusting common to all newly married folk, I went walking. My skin flushed with heat and memory, I wound through the groves to find the place where my mother had buried my little book, the one she had made of her smallest finger. She was no longer my mother, and could say nothing about it. I ate dry and spicy page-berries as I strode, and my shoulders were already red with summer.
I found it, after some searching, between a pomegranate-quill tree, hunched and spiked, and a tall, stately glue-pine. My breath caught, and I clasped my hands to my belly.
It was small, hardly as tall as I, its bark smooth as a front-board, pearlescent as a fingernail. Its leaves drooped, rustling faintly in the lazy wind. It bore few fruit, peeking from the page-leaves: the soft brown hands of my mother, with her long, graceful fingers, the oft-traced lines of her palm. I knelt beneath the little tree, and one of the dear, familiar hands turned slowly on the branch, as an apple will turn in a wavering breeze. It cradled my breast, wiping the tears from the eye at its tip, and another caressed gently the empty space above my collarbone. The hands of the tree held me so tenderly, and later I would swear to Astolfo that I could hear her old humming in the branches.
Cradled so, I looked up into those boughs, clustered with pale pages, and read on each the same word, the single word of my thirty-first year:
Forget.
THE SCARLET NURSERY
Children wish to know where they come from. It is a burning, terrible question for them, and they will phrase it a hundred ways: Why is the grass green? (Why am I not green?) Why does the wind blow? (Why do I blow and blow and make no storms or snap flowers from the stem?) Why do we live in a city? (Why am I myself and not some other child?)
It was always my part to answer, little by little, the questions they asked and did not ask, until they woke up grown.
One evening, Ikram, who liked the bloody parts best, gathered up all the bones of her supper and brought them into the Scarlet Nursery. I believe she had the entire skeleton of their delicious black swan in her enormous hand. Her fingers had been quite scratched by her brother earlier in the morning over the not-insignificant matter of a toy gryphon and his missing feathers. I myself had dined already, as I am accustomed to do, upon several savory dishes: the sound of their laughing, of the bones rubbing together in Ikram’s brown hand like a witch casting her eye, the whispers of the moon moving over the floor of the nursery, the snorting of the camels in the stables, the little harp a queensmaid played that afternoon in a far room of the al-Qasr, plucking to herself a little ballad in which some lover or another suffered calamity. It was a rich meal; I groaned with the weight of it. I sat in the center of the red room, the walls soft and crimson, the pillows of the floor sewn with ruby silk, even the bowls of the lamps lacquered as red as burning hearts. Everything large, everything strong, everything shaped to their mountainous hands, and meant never to break except on purpose.
I sat while they ate below, opening my ears to their full span, which is to say I filled the room entire, my ears waving softly in the red light like sweet fishes’ fins, sampling a few notes of the roof creaking as a dessert. Only in solitude do I eat, and open myself so far, so