"We will do it again, we will do it again and you will not speak unless I speak to you. We will walk the eight footsteps as though there had never been another eight, and we will do it in the proper way, and I will fill you up with islands like this one, and you will not speak, you will not speak, you will never tell anyone about the other eight. I will speak for you. Walk, woman, and fasten your mouth to itself."

Izanami walked. She placed one delicate foot before the other, eight times, as before, and she kept her eyes on the weeping floor. The dew made the green into a churning sea, and she thought of the bridge of heaven, and the light singing down the suspensors, and first of all things which lament, she mourned the loss of the perfect and silent bridge.

At the eighth step, Izanami and Izanagi met, and Izanagi cried out so loudly that the jellyfish paused in their flagellate, and their bodies fluttered up in the echoes like wings.

"Oh," he crowed, "what a beauty you are!"

Izanami stood still, and her eyes were full of pity as a basin catching rain. Her gaze did not falter or change as he pushed her against the wall, her shoulder blades scraping at the scarlet-gold paint which lettered the lacquer. She did not look away in modesty or try to encourage him as he lifted her off of her feet and sunk his teeth into her, sunk his body into her, sunk an island chain into her womb as he grinned into her unsweating skin.

They were already awake inside her when he pulled back from her, let her body slump against the wall. Dirt and worms and long grasses, camphor and plum and snails and milking goats, rivers full of silver silt and mosquitoes hovering over the shallows, spiders flinging their webs over their arms like winter sweaters, pelicans with their gullets fish-bulging-she swelled up with them in the little house on Onogoro, and the jellyfish sluiced into each other on the beach, wet, suddenly, with the first rain of all things that fall.

Izanagi was not there when the first of them was born. He was digging in the translucent corpses, shoving the pale, shapeless forms into his cheeks, sucking his fingers dry, slurping at their feeble, still-wavering tendrils. To him, they tasted of his first breath, and he licked his lips hungrily as he swallowed them down.

And in the house of the pillar, Izanami squatted on the tortoise-floor, biting her hands to keep back screams as the Ohoyashima dropped out of her in a knotted chain, like a necklace popping from her flesh, bead by bead, and she wept, first of all creatures that bled in birth. Awaji fell, already cracked with earthquakes, then Shikoku, so small she hardly felt it clatter from her. The Oki islands came next, shimmering like drops of her own sweat, then Kyushu red with volcanoes, and this scorched her spotless thighs with streaks of black like footprints. Iki and Tsushima emerged amid a thousand blades, and Sado swaddled in green. Then Honshu, and the inlets, the streams and the wide peak of Fuji opened the bones of her hips, and the crack of the bones was terrible, terrible and quiet, echoing only in the empty Room of Eight Footsteps.

Izanagi entered as Honshu left the womb of Izanami in a clatter of blasted rock, as it was carried away with the others on the churning sea, beneath the bridge of heaven and away. And so it was that he saw none of their first children, and only later walked on their fields and bones. But he saw their first limbed child, he saw it slither from her like an afterbirth, silvery and spineless, its piscine hands clutching helplessly at the air, the colorless blood languid within it, as though it were merely a sack sloshing with water.

Izanagi saw it with delight and went to devour it, for in its shapeless mass it looked like nothing so much as the pathetic, directionless jellyfish of which he had so much pleasure.

"No," hissed Izanami, "it is our child, our firstborn, and I have called it Hiruko."

Izanagi snorted. "That soft and stupid thing is no child-not any child of mine, if it is alive at all. You ought not to name the clots that squirm out of you, any more than you name your excrement, or your vomit. Let me eat it, and I will fill you up again."

And Hiruko reached out to its father, gills opening in its skin like cracks in opal. It whimpered, and in its infant cry Izanagi heard jellyfish dying, dying, and his own belly gurgling with their weight. He drew back from the silver hand, his throat squeezing itself like a fist.

"It is my child," said Izanami calmly, her black hair hanging over her face, "it is beautiful, and if you eat it I will unhinge myself to eat you. I have borne the earth within me; you will be no trouble."

"It is a punishment," he growled, "a curse, because you spoke first. It is a monster, a leech that has become fat on your blood-stamp it out, stamp it out, and atone for your wicked mouth. Crush it with your feet, woman, and your next child will be whole, it will come from my words, not your twisted, rotted exhalations."

Izanami held her child to her breast, and its nacre-mouth fastened to its mother-Izanagi watched in revulsion as the first milk of the world flowed into that tiny, boneless body, he could see the white droplets moving under its skin, which flushed in strange colors as it drank. If nothing else about it could be said to be healthy it drank as though dying, as though the breast locked between its toothless gums were all the world, and the sweet sounds of its sighing and mewing, slurping and swallowing filled the house, as such sounds would come to fill houses like habits.

"Throw it to the floor and crush its skull," Izanagi screeched, and he tore the leech-child from its cradle of arms and milk. A bellow he could not imagine would have come from such a pitiful chest tore through his ears, and Izanami clawed at him, tearing away the flesh of his arm after her child-and thus the second being in all the world learned to bleed. He took Hiruko, wailing its gruesome song to the grasses of Onogoro, out of the little house and down to the beach-and Izanami was close behind, her black hair streaming like serpents behind her, and she did not scream, but her mouth curled like a wound.

Into the sucking morass of thin tentacles and curving, transparent bells, he cast the leech-child's silvery body, and its awful cry stopped as it sank into the striations of corpses, its eyes confused and stricken, vestigial eyelids opening and closing without understanding. The other bodies closed over Hiruko, its limbs little different from theirs, one more who could not tell where the sea might end.

Izanagi took the only woman yet in the world by the arm and hauled her back up to the house, to the Room of Eight Footsteps, to the tortoise-floor now grey and slick with tears and blood and seed, and into this he threw her, and fell upon her, and though she made no sound beneath him, he whispered obscenities into the hollow of her throat as he filled her this time with a son, a son she could already feel flaring red and orange within her, and he too could feel the heat of it pouring from her even before he pulled himself off of her body.

He was gorging again when she bore it, and there was sand between his teeth, and the ruined diamond slush of the creatures dribbling from his chin. He would not have gone to see the new child at all-the feast was waiting, after all-except that something bright and hot swirled up from the house of the pillar, and he turned his head to the top of the bluffs, where first of all things in the world that burned, the little house vomited smoke black as Izanami's hair into the clear sky.

"Kagu-tsuchi!" came a howl from the blaze.

He ran up the sliding sands, half-curious at the beauty of the strange gold thing eating his house.

"Kagu-tsuchi!" came the howl like a tree-trunk tearing in two.

Izanagi stepped through the shattered door, which had once been carved so prettily, as if to welcome them, and saw the only woman yet in the world standing on the tortoise-floor, her body wrapped up in red, in orange, in blue and white. Her flesh bubbled on her bones, and her once-swelling belly sagged as if it meant to fall from her; her thighs were burnt black and crisp, and the smell of the meat of her filled the hall. The hot, ropy light pulled back her lips from her teeth, her lids from her eyes, and what stared at him was a skull, save that her hair still streamed back from it, as though it had all along been conspirator to the flames.

In her hands she held a flashing, flaring thing, its limbs splayed out and full of the boiling scarlet stuff, tongues of it licking around his chubby infant's arms, his mouth full of it, his eyes too bright, too bright, burning already in its head.

"Kagu-tsuchi!" she snarled, thrusting the inferno-child at Izanagi. "This is Kagu-tsuchi, this is Fire, it is born to us, it is your longed-for son, from your pure and perfect words! Take him, take him and may he burn you out from the inside, may he hollow you like a gourd, as he has done to me."

All around them, the house buckled and creaked, the fire of Kagu-tsuchi lapping hungrily at its mother's breast, at his mother's feet, at anything that would burn. Happily he nursed at the floor and rafters, at the ruined words carved on the holy wall. Izanagi held out his hand to his wife.

"Come out of this place," he begged.

Izanami threw back her head, burned clean of flesh, and her voice sent the roof into conflagration. Her body opened as if on a hinge, and out of her blazing bones tore a child of green and forked branches, her mouth a cluster of bleeding berries, and this was Hani-yama-hime, who was the growing earth, and then a splash of water which did nothing to dampen the orange flames still lapping at the belly of Izanami, and a sopping, blue-skinned daughter descended from her mother: Midzu-ha-no-me, who was well-water and puddles and lakes, and her fingers dripped with scum and algae. They rolled on the smoking floor, and Midzu gurgled as she slapped out lazy sparks with her wet and plump hands.

Izanami held her son to her tightly, and flames poured from her blackened womb, from her shriveled breasts, it leapt out of her mouth, and Kagu-tsuchi laughed, patting his mother's cheek with a flaming hand.

As she died, first of all women in the world to die, she thrust her son into Izanagi's arms, and her knees buckled into ash beneath her, and her body blackened the green-tiled floor.

Izanagi ran from the holocaust-house, his arms full of children as of apples, and Kagu-tsuchi giggled in his arms. Midzu-ha-no-me started patting at her brother, dowsing his flames in places, while he struck back at her, trying to set her afire. Hani-yama kept her wooden arms far away from both of them, shuddering. Izanagi dowsed his son in the churning sea, and the flames beneath the baby's skin banked to glowing embers, warm and cheerful. Midzu splashed happily, and her sister drank the waves with soft sighs. He drew his son from the water and stroked his cheek. The child turned his face towards his father's finger.

All around them, the jellyfish curled at the edges like pages and turned black, shriveling to smears on the water, and then to nothing.

FOURTH HEAD.

{Her belly had grown into a globe, swollen with her fourth daughter's kicking life and round as a toy. She was become the moon, circular and symmetrical, a vast pale mass, pulling all the pulsing life of her youth into the new planet of her stomach, into the little red limbs floating inside her,} floating, floating, within me, within her, circle and back, circle and back, into the interior churn, the water, the streaks of fat and lymph and blood, familiar as houses {adrift on an inland sea, a thing which would be me, which once had gills and transparent skin like a salmon, that once swam in the universe of her body, but now pushed at the edges, outgrowing the space, impinging on tender organs and galaxies, stretching the tanned skin. She had become the Kaya-bird,} my Kaya-bird {her chest bright and out-thrust. Her movements were those of elephants, lumbering crocodiles.} Ours are the movements of nesting, and the surfaces of nameless eggs, and soft, slithering things over the forest floor, and there is never any release for us, but we manage, don't we, Kaya, we manage. {She could no longer bear the pinch of shoes on her feet, and walked barefoot through her house, marveling at her own metamorphosis into a snarl-toothed hippopotamus.} After the third, my skin was hot and crackling in its boil of color. Even my toes had gone blue as rocks on the floor of the sea. My eyes were still shut, slick and pale against saffron eyelids. Each of you made me heavier, warmer, as though I was incubating you. And the cut, the cut along my underside had widened, flushed redder and wetter, and begun to drip onto the thirsty ground.

{But still, the baby did not come. Eight months and she was simply enormous. She could hardly move.} Gashed and daughter-full, I can hardly move, they hardly move within me, it was summer and everything was so still, so still. {She felt as though she contained cities, river barges, farming communes. She could feel the corners of the rice-fields pressing on her left side, carved temple-reliefs on the other. In the centre swelled a sanguinary Fuji. Snow swirled at her peaks, dense jungle crowded her base. Once she had been lithe and small, delicate, even, not this glutted thing.} They told me you were the middle child, the prettiest save the last, and that you never listen. They told me about the tall weeds, and your little, wiry hands.

{In the beginning, I think, she had dreamed about this child, that it would at last be a son, dreamed of his dark eyes and soft skin, how his laughter would sound. But by that summer she merely prayed for release, for the end of her enormity, the end of the sensation of being filled to the throat, a sack of rice packed as tightly as possible, sent to market with tufts of white flying out of the bindings.} They told me your sweet lips were famed in the province, and that the man who was neither sweaty nor pimpled secretly wanted you, even as he opened their obi under the stars.

{It was a Tuesday, dawned hot and blue, that she decided. No one was in the house, the doldrums of summer having boiled everyone red and driven them into town. She took a scythe from the shed-wall, the one with the smooth black handle. She marched out along the beaten dirt paths to the weedy fields like a general approaching his cavalry line. Stopping in the center of that yellow sea, she began, with long, sweeping strokes, to cut the gold-green stalks of thorny grass.} They told me you were the middle child, and that you never listen, but they indulge you, because of your rosy lips, and how they came from the weeds. Will you not touch the wall of my throat, pretty Kaya? You can tell your birth-story over and over, it will not make you less dead.

{My mother loves me. She will cut us out, one day.} Your mother forgot you as soon as the man who was neither fetid nor foul woke without his third wife. How many girls do you think she could lose before she no longer held you precious as the soup-eyes? Mothers forget, it is what they do. They cannot always be expected to be wet at the teat and smiling. And the prettiest girl, even the prettiest-save-the-last, does not always make the best soup.

{She panted with the effort of having me,} all mothers do {sweat ran down her face and back like delta-silt into the ocean.} All mothers sweat so. {The scythe rushed through the tender plants, her brown hair flapping like a nightingale's wing in time to the strokes. She told me that imagined she must have looked like deathshead, this young woman with her great scythe and plain black dress, weeds falling before her like ranks of soldiers.} No, darling, I am Death, and I bend the weeds, and I hold you inside me, and you are my child, and nevermore hers. {Death with long-lashed eyes,} eyes in soup, eyes in children, eyes in me {gliding through the fields like a shadow, Death beautiful and terrible, with her gentle face and singing blade. Only the great curve of her belly called her liar, called her not-Death; she swung the scythe high, grimaced with the effort of the swing; her arms burned. She was no doctor, to induce labor peaceably in a clean room, but gave herself to the strain of her muscles in the sun. With a downward stroke she felt something move inside her, like a stone grinding aside.

It was the weed-trees for you, then, the little saplings not yet grown. {She fell to her knees in the sweet-smelling earth, strands of grass stuck to her hair.} And with the cicadas in your ears from the moment of your birth, you never learned to listen. {I was born small, but my lips were perfectly formed, and so pink.} They tasted of orchid, of orchid and crabgrass.

{The sun was hot so early in the day when we woke and Kiyomi was gone. The man who was neither lovely nor soft took me by the wrist-his hand went all the way around my bones!-and his face went blotched and black. He accused my mother of cheating him, said that he would burn her house and poor father's fields if he was not given the wife he was promised. He said the others died because mother did not give proper obeisance to the gods; it spared him because he was pious} I spared him because his blood smelled of oil and shit { he took me there, that morning, into the rear rooms, and I cried, oh, I cried} poor Kaya-bird {I screamed and squealed as he tore my clothes, and he stopped up my mouth with his tabi and my tears soaked it through, and he pulled the bloody veil of my sisters' weddings over my face and his breath came in hitching gasps, frightened, mouse-chirp wheezes.} I was sleeping when you came, but your sobs, your sobs were like thrushes singing {He dragged me from my mother's house and she did not cry-I called back to her over and over-why are you not crying?} You ask too much of mothers, to weep over every child they lose. {Mother, why won't you weep for me? And my father looked at his feet, mumbled that this was the way of marriages, sometimes, and one doesn't approve, but when the grandsons are underfoot no one recalls the ceremony.} He fell to his knees in immobile ecstasy when I reared up from the waving weeds, holding his arms out, {and I stopped crying, for at least this I understood, understood I was no different, that the man who was neither young nor old was still dripping from between my legs and this was no shield, a wife is no safer than a maid} and I sighed into my Kaya-bird, nuzzling your new-beloved face with my own, crooning to you in the Mouth-dialect, knowing you would understand it, hear the new chorus behind the lower registers, for you were open and pulseate, and I was ready, hungry for your form to fill the void I carry like an egg within me, ready to be full of you, like a pale moon, and heavy. { I held up my arms like a child waiting to be picked up, and the colors of the snake's mouth, oh, they were brighter than festival lanterns, and in the wavering throats like weeds I saw my sisters' mouths opening and closing like anemones, and I smiled, I smiled as you took me in, I was only frightened for a moment-} He was weeping, shaking terribly-he understood, perhaps, what passion is. He hated my flesh and loved it, he cannot possess it, but it is possible he desired it, desired the thing glutted with the bodies of his wives, and knew that he was weak, that I could possess him, and their purity was no shield.

{I} you {can hear} me {you, always, even if I do not like to listen. Sometimes I} you {touch the gullet-flesh} my body {with my} your {tongue, like an icicle, and it burns me} it thrills through me {it tastes sweet, like the old soup.} V.

NE NO KUNI.

Izanagi was alone on Onogoro.

The jellyfish had gone, somehow, learning at last what was and was not ocean, or at least, failing their lessons elsewhere. The strand was silent, and the ruins of the house of the pillar rose up like broken black jaws on the bluff. The pillar still stood, blasted and tall, and it seemed to laugh at him.

"Izanami!" He called to the cinders.

"Izanami!" He called to the empty shore.

"Izanami!" He called to the churning sea, and to the Heaven-Spanning Bridge, whose girded underside he could still glimpse, on clear days, far up behind the blue of the sky.

First of all things that are left behind, Izanagi could not think where she might have got to. He put Kagu-tsuchi, and his sisters to bed in the rushes and asked them what happened to women when they burned-they being the source of fire, and the death, and there being no one else to ask.

Kagu-tsuchi did not know. He sucked his thumb like a match-head.

Midzu-ha-no-me did not know. She sucked her thumb like a faucet.

Hani-yama-hime did not know. She sucked her thumb like a stalk of grass.

With the shadow of the bridge thin and receding on the shoals, Izanagi lashed together the trunks of eight young trees, and taking a lock of his son's hair to light his way, tucked the three bright-eyed children of Izanami's flesh away in the charred shell of the house with the last of the jellyfish to give them suck. On his raft of trees, the first widower of all things bereft set out across the churning sea, across the foam and the tipped waves, across the violet water and the black.

When he ran aground on Honshu, his beard was tangled and clotted with salt. He marveled at how Honshu-his-child had grown, how the acacia had brambled, how the mountains had grown braids and top-knots of snow. How the stones had rolled up from the barrels of earth. And he wandered.

"Izanami!" he called to the bloody-flowered acacia.

"Izanami!" he called to the top-knots of snow.

"Izanami!" he called to the stones from the barrels of earth.

And it was the stones that answered.

"Here," they murmured in their grinding, "here."

Izanagi pushed stone aside from stone, slate from shale.

"Here," they sighed, and moved from their loam, "here."

Behind a certain stone, there was a hole, tangled with roots and sifting soil, tangled with the dead-skin bells of mushroom and the sinuous movements of centipedes retreating from the light.

"Come in," sighed the centipedes as their ruby tails vanished, "this is Ne no Kuni, the Root-Country. She is here, she is here."

It was small, only wide enough for his shoulders, for his own hips, and it was open and dark as a mouth.

"Izanami?" he whispered.

No answer came, and thus, second of all things that go under the earth, Izanagi wriggled through the scrim of mud into Ne no Kuni.

In the Root-Country, there is no light. Even before there was land, there was light, and Izanagi crawled through the sludge trying to taste the dark, to breathe it, to understand how so complete and utter a thing could have come to be without his knowledge. The darkness grew around him until he no longer felt the wet earth stroking his limbs, but was simply over-hung with it, like curtains and veils, and he could see nothing, first of all blinded things. His feet squelched in a kind of softness underfoot; his hands groped in a mist like breath. There was no sound but himself and the darkness, which seemed to draw into itself and out again.

He pulled a comb from his hair, fashioned in the days before Kagu-tsuchi from pieces of the tortoise-floor, days Izanagi recalled as happy, when Izanami was quiet and fat with islands. He fumbled in the black with the curl of his son's hair, and lit the edge of the green comb. Fire flared out of the prongs, white and gold as a blanched sun, and the tile-teeth burned slowly down.

In the sudden glare, he lifted one foot and then the other out of the yielding ground; in the sudden glare there was no ground but flesh; in the sudden glare there was no air but the thick fumes of decay spiraling yellow and gray; in the sudden glare there was no Ne no Kuni, there was only Izanami, spread out over the gloam like a shroud, her body become the Root-Country. He was deep in her, in the pooled, moon-shot morass of her stomach, stretched now into a vast and planted field, wavering with untold grasses, with straggling trees clutching at her navel like dead hands. Her breasts rose up stiff and capped with black ice-clouds and cracks clustered at their peaks. Her arms lay out straight as highways, pocked with moldering wells and sinks where her blood had become brackish rivers moving sluggish and sere through the hollows of her elbows. Her knees had split open, and the flora of the dead already bloomed there, asphodel and dragonfruit and oranges like leering faces. Her thighs and calves spread off behind him; he could not see their end. She was gargantuan, the landscape itself, and her skin was broken so often, still streaked with scorch-streaks, that the red curve of her liver rivaled her femur for color-ghast, and her broken ribs rose up in jagged, thin-tipped stalactites. Her heart did not beat, but sat huge in the center of the world like an anchor dropped into an unguessable sea, cut by wiry meridians, its ventricles swollen and spider-blown, congealed and flayed and burning still.

Izanagi's lips curled back in disgust, and he vomited onto the navel of his wife-but the sight of his trickling sour seeping into her flesh caused his dry throat to retch again, and again, pushing against itself and finding nothing more to give to the country of Izanami.

Somewhere behind the ice-caps of her teeth, a cry began. It hurtled up from the depths of the rocks of her bones, it shook the hand-roots of the trees worming at her sternum. The roof of the Izanami-world shook, and strands of her hair, which he could see now had made up the great darkness stretching over him and over her. Great, ropy shafts of it tumbled down, crashing onto the wet-flesh earth, sending up sprays of stilled, clotted blood. The cry grew until he knew it for the voice of Izanami, and amid the spray of long braids slashing through liquefying vertebrae, Izanagi, first of all things that feared, ran from the bellow of his wife towards the tunnel which had emptied him into her.

"OUT! OUT!" it snarled, and shards of cartilage shot through with starlight and mosses cut through his back like shrapnel. He scrambled up through the mud and the skein of roots, through the centipedes laughing "Here, here!" and the stones gurgling dryly around him like swallowing throats.

"OUT! OUT!" the cry shook the dirt from the tunnel, and it sifted onto the face of Izanagi, it drifted into his eyes, his nose, his mouth, until he could not breathe, nor see. He choked, first of all things in the world to suffocate, and he was filled up with her, her voice stopping his ears like wax, flakes of her skin closing up every open part of him.

The stones moved aside like water and with a cloud of sweat and dust Izanagi was thrown onto the long grass still clutching his burning comb-though it scalded him, he held it before him as though it were his only dear thing. There was a sudden detonation of light, and he sprawled, prostrate as a penitent, on the green earth, beaten down by the sky and covered in the detritus of the Root-Country-which-is-Izanami, soaked in her dead-sour ablutions, clammy and shuddering.

Yet still, the cry barreled up from the weed-massed crevice, and he covered his hands with his face as it serrated the air: "OUTOUTOUT! OUT OF MY GRAVE, OUT OF MY FLESH, YOU HAVE NO PLACE IN ME! EATER OF CHILDREN, EATER OF DEATH, GLUTTON, GLUTTON, GLUTTON! GO WITH THE CHILDREN WHO ARE TOO BIG FOR YOU TO EAT, GO WITH HONSHU, GO WITH KYUSHU, GO WITH KAGU-TSUCHI. COME NEVER HERE AGAIN, I WILL LET NO ONE PASS. I WILL DEVOUR EVERYTHING YOU MAKE, I WILL DESTROY EVERYTHING YOU SIRE WITH THAT SICK, MEWLING BODY. IN THE MOMENT THEY DRAW BREATH, I WILL BE THERE TO SNATCH IT BACK. THIS IS MY WORLD, NOW, IN THE DEEPS AND THE DARK. KEEP TO YOUR HALF, SPOILED BY LIGHT. GO, GET OUT, GOBBLE UP THE WHOLE WORLD IF YOU CAN, BUT COME NEAR MY COUNTRY AGAIN AND I WILL BURN YOU, BELLY-OUT, AS YOU BURNED ME."

Izanagi scrambled back from the gales of the voice, which stank of putrefaction: mushrooms and oversweet fruit, spoilt fat and dried blood.

"I would not come into your disgusting country again for any price," he sputtered, trying to scoop the offal from his eyes, scrape it from his tongue, "and I can sire worlds faster than you can lay them waste! You will see how many sons, how many islands, how many blazing boys will come tumbling out of me! You can't take them all, and for every thousand you claw to pieces I will bring fifteen hundred out of the ground. You should not have been made, there is no need for you-you are a leech-child like that monstrosity you spawned, and you have as little strength, as little beauty. You cannot banish me from the dark-I banish you from the light, and no one will care that you are gone, when the world is as full of my children as the beaches of Onogoro with jellyfish!"

The stones said nothing, but rolled back into place like sliding screens. The voice was gone. The earth glared back at him, baleful and silent.

Izanagi turned from Ne no Kuni, half-blinded, and ran from the soundlessness of the cleft-he followed the green smell of water to a babbling stream and finally cooled his eyes, his nose, his throat, and his burnt hands. He dropped the comb into the water, and cleaned first his left eye, dropping a clump of dust and dried flesh from his lid into the cold river.

He could not be sure, but he swore that the clump glittered, and shone, not at all like rotted flesh, but like gold, and fire.

He cleaned then his right eye, dropping a clump of dust and dried blood into the cold river.

He could not be sure, but he swore that the clump glittered, and shone, not at all like dried blood, but like silver, and light moving on still water.

He cleaned then his nose, and with a great breath blew a clump of dust and pulverized lung into the cold river.

He could not be sure, but he swore that the clump darkened, and thundered, not at all like the terrible cry, but like rain approaching from far off.

And in the water three things opened their eyes: the first clump flared out in a spiral, with hair red as the flames which ate the house on Onogoro, and she was Ama-Terasu, and she was the sun, and her eyes seemed to both rise and set at once. The second pooled out in a slow circle, and his skin was the color of the river, and it was difficult to tell where he ended and it began, for he was all over silver light, and he was Tsuki-Yomi, and he was the moon, and his hair was grey as clouds. The third clump seemed to fall apart and come together several times, a dervish whipping the water into foam, and its hair was storm-black, wet with salt seas, and his feet were ringed by jellyfish like newborn diamonds, and he was Susanoo-no-Mikoto, and he was the storm-and-wind, and he was me.

FIFTH HEAD.

It is sad, that this part never lasts It is sad, that this part never lasts the held gasp before events tumble towards the base of my belly when you do not know whether becoming no-longer-a-maiden will be terrible or marvelous, whether it will be all whiteness and the smell of clean skin, the way it has been in your heart When she is lovely and young and her flesh is full as a moon, the soft snort of a horse in the first morning of winter, whether it will be different for you, when so many sisters have gone ahead of you, and you are plain, and not like them, who had faces like winter fruits the smell of her heart beating, of the sweat beading on her throat, whether he will whisper in your ear: "Kyoko, Kyoko, I love you," Kyoko, Kyoko, I love you "I do not care that you are plain." I do not care that you are plain.

I made the soup best of all, and I only wanted to keep making the soup until I was old and bent over the pot like a letter. The fifth daughter cannot ask for more. Your hair was matted under the poor, beleaguered veil My hands always-do you know how eyes smell? yes, yes, like copper filings, and green stems stuck upright in salt -smell of eyes, of burnt iris. It made me happy, to breathe that smell in my bed at night. I covered my face with my fragrant hands. My mother gave me the bed closest to the fire. I want the poise of this to last, when I stood over her, flashing violet and scarlet she gave birth to me in the storage room, among all the grass jars of eyes, pupils peeping between the woven reeds, watched, watching, and all those fishy, sweet things watched my dark head emerge from my mother, watched her first milk fall into my mouth, and they applauded with their feathery lids before she has looked up from her shamed posture to see that I am beautiful after all, beautiful enough for both of us.

The sound of blinking was so soft, softer than my mother's hand smoothing my wet hair. Kyoko, Kyoko, you are so quiet within me, and closed, like a crocus, like a candle. O smooth wax heart, this is marriage, meat and maiden, and me around you like a closed hand, and me bleeding from the belly like a new wife, slit open, oozing blood onto the earth like a bedsheet She said when the man who was neither sallow nor dark returned with that same veil dangling from his broken hands that this was enough, he had had four of her daughters, he would have no more of us. I hid behind the screen and was relieved; I could stay and wash eyes and boil water, I could stay with my mother and all the grass-jars would watch me while I moved through summers like water slowly through a canyon. marry me, marry me, Kyoko, and I will rock you to sleep through a thousand thousand summers and you will sleep on a bed of my body, our bodies, sister to sister like a ladder into the earth But he was penitent, he was sorry, he was bereft, widowed four times over, and give him but the plainest of the daughters left to her and he would not take that road again, but stay in this very house, dedicate his fortune to theirs, and they would all be safe, safe together, and they would burn incense on four graves forever, and there would be sons, yes, and the pot would keep bubbling in its way. I want to hold the swelling of your body in my own coils, to circumnavigate your tiny limbs.

She frowned, my mother, and her hand fluttered to her belly like a memory. She led me quietly from behind the screen, and tucked my unruly hair behind my ears. She patted my cheek. She told me to try to be a good girl, and with thin and bloodless lips whispered that marriage was a joy, a joy and a wonder. She put my hand in the hand of the man who neither laughed nor wept.

"Kyoko, Kyoko, marry me," he said. Kyoko, Kyoko, marry me "Marriage is a joy, a joy and a wonder, and I will put honey under your tongue." I will put you under my tongue Will it be all whiteness and the smell of clean skin, the way it has been in my heart it will be all whiteness and the smell of clean skin, and you will be clothed in me like a dress, and I will hush you to sleep, plain little Kyoko you will hush me to sleep I will sing you to sleep. I dreamed through my wedding-blood, you know I know. You I were was waiting for me you. I came whistling down the way down the way, down the way I came whistling down the way to my true love's door I left the window open and the wind was warm My colors came filtering through rice paper, and touched my face, woke me from my husband's arms, softly as a woman's fingers. I could not move, could not breathe, could only widen your soft black eyes and try to take all of me in, the shimmer of a thousand rainbows across your breast, the dark promise of my blue-black stomach, heaving and swelling for its promised Kyoko. I have eradicated all human women from this bed already I was confused, I could not tell if those colors were snake or sister already it was becoming confused, the voice of my throat of my belly of my lungs of my tongue was not my own, was becoming (ours) was becoming theirs, the rooster screamed once, but not again. I am the truly pure, and your mock marriage dissolved into love when faced with the multitude of my skin.

Serpent! Oh, Kyoko, when you raised up your arms! Monster! Oh, Kyoko, when your hair fell over his cheek! Oh, Monster, your eyes were so bright, so bright, as if they glowed from within a jar of grass! If he could touch the part of you that first glimpsed my flesh, moons within moons moving under that silver-green skin flesh you should have abhorred but cannot how could you I think I you would abhor this body of bodies myself? he might be able to crush it, wrap it in seaweed and boil it into something sweet and small. I have always been sweet and small. But even if he could tear you from my ruby flanks and run back to the fire-lit hall with you under his arm, how could he live, knowing that for a flashing instant you had loved a Monster? I sometimes wonder if he let me take you, Kyoko after Kaya after Kiyomi after Kameko after Kazuyo, because it was easier than suffering that humiliation. After all, there are always more of us left to take. And I had never seen such eyes, such living eyes, staring at me as though they were all the eyes I had ever stirred into salt. The Mouth quaked for you, I quaked for you it did not wish to wait for contemplation, as though the man were an altar and I, penitent on knees I do not possess. I bent my knees for both of us, on the thin bed-roll, and your eyes, open to bursting, and as I took you into me you cried out, Serpent! ripping the leaves from the trees. Monster! filled with you, swallowed into myself writhing, your eyes were so great above me, multiplied, floating, floating floating over you me, in you me, and there was nothing else, only me, us in the dark, and four strange hands reaching out through the meat-and-maiden, four pale hands drawing a mouth Mouth over me like a veil and helping me to step up, step up, into the fold.

It was all whiteness, and the smell of clean skin, just as I had thought it might be. VI.