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In Hoaka, there was a moth with gray wings like blown ash, and he drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping ptarmigan. The tears were rosy and thin, like a girl’s perfume.
In the city of Lament, there was a very small moth with the whitest wings you ever saw, and she drank the tears of a sleeping hoopoe, and the tears were soft and fine, like the hair of children.
In Irsil, there was a butterfly with no wings at all, who with her very last strength drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping sparrow. The tears were spicy and thick, but they did her no good.
In Kash, there was a moth with wings all flaming and smoking, and he drank the tears of a sleeping phoenix, which were molten white, like a blade not yet born.
In Urim, there was a moth with wings like mourning veils, and he laid them over the eyes of the dead. He drank from the tears of a blood-cold kingfisher. The tears were red as apple skins, and blue as moonlight.
In Nahara, there was a moth with wings like a church window, full of brilliant greens and reds and blues. She drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping loon. The tears were black and thick, like an ebony sill.
And in Varaahasind, there was a moth with brown wings like a hundred other moths, and he drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping peacock. The tears were blue and green and gold, like the skin of a snake, and his name was Fahad, and he came to this window, his belly full of tears.
What do the birds dream that makes them weep so? We might have asked, but they are quick to eat, and not to converse. Instead we flutter over the face of the world, in every dusty pocket and lantern halo, and drink their grief, and taste their mourning in the draft. Eggs that fall from the nest and break on the grass, terrible strands of yolk flung from blade to blade, not enough seeds in the winter, falcons with claws that snatch, fish which are too clever by half—ah! We have known these sorrows! But once in a long while there are the flavors of other miseries floating there. It took all the tears I have mentioned and more for us to taste the whole of it. We brought them, clinging to a thousand proboscises like diamond necklaces, to the cistern at the center of Ilinistan, the City of Insects, which is a place you are not permitted to know. There is flame there which does not burn the wing, and webs which do not tear, and rivers of sugar water trickling through mossy stones. There hives make honey for joy in its gold, and not for the hungry mouths of men. There ants may rest, for winters do not scour us, nor is any sweet thing rare.
There are so many flowers there, my lady, you cannot imagine.
And in the center of Ilinistan, there is a cistern, where the ants and the beetles and the termites hollowed a stump so smoothly and perfectly that anyone might be proud to write upon its walls as though it were the finest paper, save that the stranger should be promptly devoured by spiders for the offense. And once in a long while, the drinkers of tears commune there, to understand the sorrow of the birds, who are also not permitted to know the way to Ilinistan. So we let our tears fall, one by one, blue by white by red by green by yellow, into the cistern, until it is full to brimming, and we can look in its waters and see the shape of the thing that the birds mourn.
In the cistern, oh lady, oh Star, oh lost and lonely thing, I saw your face, and knew that your course would pass under the ground, where only the worms go, to whatever pale, blind city they call their own, and which I am not permitted to know.
THE TALE
OF THE LEAF
AND THE SNAKE,
CONTINUED
THE MOTH REGARDED ME FOR A MOMENT.
“Will you not weep, lady? Do you not care?”
“I am more interested, friend Fahad, in the existence of a place which I am not permitted to know.”
“He will come for you this evening, this very one.”
“And he will find us dressed in our very best, as befits children awaiting a visit from their father, and a wife her husband.”
I put my hand, very gently, to the moth’s wings, and stroked the fine hairs. “Stars burn out, little moth.”
But surely you know this story. Surely you danced it, or sang it, or heard it at your mother’s breast. I am so common, these days. Everyone speaks in my voice.
I did not burn out. Oh, Mother, why did you not let me? You could have stitched me together again, as though the hole was never there, and I could have forgotten what it felt like to tear myself out of you, what it felt like to have children tear themselves out of me, what it felt like to dribble light into a man’s mouth night after night. What my children looked like as they faded to nothing. What I looked like, too.
I did not burn out. I came to the lakeside, where, I suppose now, all things come. There was a sorry little dock in dire need of new paint, and a low tide, frothing gray water and sandpipers fishing for fleas. What sort of fleas do they find, I wonder? I walked the shore, and my elbows were damp. I was stuck between woman and snake, my body twisting out of one and into the other—did my mother wish to indicate that I should have made up my mind? I have already said I do not understand her. She probably had nothing to do with it. I walked the shore and I could see the ferryman coming, I could see his raft and his ruined mast, I could see his pole. And when he moored at the dock, I stepped forward, to climb aboard.
But the air thickened like cream around me, and there were hands on my chest, pushing me back. Dimly in the fog I could see the faces of my girls, my loves, my little Stars, their beautiful eyes burning up the air. They put out their hands to me, and I took them as I used to—they were cold, but women’s hands are often cold. How many times do I remember breathing on them, rubbing them red again? They would not let me pass. They opened their mouths in unison, and I saw that their tongues were cut out. They pressed on me in unison and I staggered.
And in the throng I could see two, one with no eyes, and one with no ears, who cried out louder than any. They pushed and wept and their laments were like stones thrown after an unwanted child. They pushed me back from the shore, and the ferryman watched, but made no move. They pushed me back, and back, and back, to the wet green jungle and the red towers.
I opened one hundred and forty-five pairs of eyes.
They pushed me into those bodies, those bodies who had eaten me, chewed me to gristle, and still held me in their swilling bellies. It felt strange to move one hundred and forty-five pairs of arms. They seemed to pinwheel all around me, I could not keep them steady. I looked with my eyes into my eyes into my eyes, I was in all of them, and I could smell pig’s flesh, always, always. They swallowed me down; I lived inside them like a child. And in the core of each of them, under the pig’s
heart and the pig’s squealing lungs and the pig’s starving stomach, was the little white blade of the pig’s tooth. Only my husband was empty of that tooth, and him I could not bear to smell, or hear, or touch.
But the rest were a smoky labyrinth of pig and man, and I writhed through it, flashing green at their boiled and festering pinks.
