The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [34]
But she also spoke strangely, as a mystic in the desert might, balanced on his high pale pillar under the infinite stars—if a woman could stand thus, and speak thus, and bear the pain of it—which she could not.
Shame comes upon us like lightning in summer, she whispered once, over the sound of her needle pricking a hem with a tiny pop, and though the horror of it flashes so fiercely, there is pleasure in it, too, a prickling of the skin, of the stomach. That is the danger. Like the lightning, shame shows the world in terrible colors, so that you might see, if you look closely, not only the stain of your sins as they seep into your soul, but the extent of your act, all its consequences, revealed like a thousand burning reflections, everything that was changed by the moment of your fall. Perhaps Eve saw that way, not just the fig in her hand but a hundred thousand figs, shivering forward and backward, sizzling, deadly, in that moment, through all the sorrows to come, and slipping backward through all her innocent days, tainting them even though they had passed.
Even then I wondered how she could think such thoughts. Even the gossipy market-wives, their strong arms full of honey-soaked cakes and wine-jugs that we could never have hoped to buy, considered my mother pure and kind as a clutch of doves. What did she know of shame? Her heart was unfathomable to me.
And as I walked inland—though I knew nothing of where I meant to go I could not escape the feeling of inward, of moving up and in and toward something—I thought constantly of my mother’s words, her blasted, weary black eyes, and the lightning of her shame. I felt as though I could almost see that way, something dancing at the corners of my vision, Eve’s fig, my crane, moving forward and back, to what end—or beginning—I could not then say.
But it would not be long. Illumination came swiftly in that place, and with the heaviness of a great stone.
The cranes had hooted vaguely in the direction of the sun, east and north, now a little more east, now a little less north. Many cities, they shrugged. That way, out there, not so far. Post-coital etiquette occupied them, and I felt desperate to leave, to stop blushing like a child, to forget it all. And so I aimed my broken body, east and north and in and up. After days wandering through the golden stylite-pillars with their pitiless shadows, days under the accusing sun and a moon that burned me no less than her brother, her great single eye like God’s own, staring at me with such disappointment, I came upon a kind of forest. My sunken chest heaved, and I wanted to die for the hideousness of it, the kind of ugly madness contained in those trees. I would have died happily, if dying would have recused me from that place, from whatever thing my mother’s black-violet angels had planned for me here. But a man cannot die his way out of Hell.
The sky poured the first of its sweet-sour light over a copse of trees, each of them withered and twisted and grotesque in equal parts. Some trunks glowered blackly, slick with grease, and as I came near I saw them to be cannons, worked in fine designs like those of some great Emperor’s ship, and among their silvery leaves hung fruit like shot. In the wood of others I perceived arched windows and platforms on which small birds sang and pecked—these trees were fashioned like siege towers, the color of baked mudbrick, shrunken and warped as all living things may be, but nonetheless, arrows