The Melancholy of Mechagirl by Catherynne M. Valente Read Free Book Online

be glowing, and I would be able to see cities in the distance, full of crumbling and canny birds.”
    “You’re a dream. Do you understand that?”
    “Whose dream?”
    “Your wife’s. Look at what she dreams you will do to her, and what you have done in her dreaming.”
    The dream-sailor looked down at his wife. His expression was blank. “I loved her.”
    “Yes.”
    “I don’t love her anymore. You can’t love meat.”
    “That’s your business.”
    “What do I do now, Akakabu?”
    “This is the Paradise of the Pure Land. You might start with Right Thought. This is also Yokosuka. You might start with burying your wife and lighting incense for her.”
    “That does not sound like something I would do. Instead, I am hungry.”
    “You are hungry because you came out of me, and I am always hungry.”
    “I am going to the city, then. To eat things I like.”
    “What sort of things do you like?”
    Lieutenant Gabriel Salas cocked his head thoughtfully to one side. He picked up his officer’s cap and put it on. “Peacocks. Butterflies. Black sugar. Right Thought.”
    He strode from the house, his spine straight and proud, his steps turning south toward Blue Street.
    When he had gone, Rafu crawled from the corner of the room, her slats digging into the tatami. As she dragged herself the slats of fine dark wood became fingers breaking their nails on the woven grass, her silk screens became shoulders, a stomach, a strong back. She stood up, unfolding into a woman with long, hinged arms, accordioning out from her sweet torso in hanging, tiger-painted screens that ended in graceful hands. She sank down over Milo’s drowned body.
    “Save her,” my Rafu wept. “Save her because of her nakedness, how bare she was before me, and how I loved her smaller breast.”
    “It’s no good, concealer-of-my-heart. I only know how to eat things.”
BECAUSE YOU ARE NEW
    The Paradise of the Pure Land exists within Yokosuka as hair caught in a brush—the teeth of the city rise tall through the tangles and think nothing of them, but deep in the comb, long onyx strands wind and snarl. It is, of course, possible to yank all these strands free with a pitiless fist. They will not protest.
    Rafu and I followed the dream of Gabriel through Yoshikura-Chuo and along the highway, through the wet, dank tunnel and up the jungled terraces. He was not hard to follow, being loud and foreign. He ate cherry trees along the way, opening his jaw and swallowing them whole as I might. When he reached the city, he seized in one hand a Peacock of Right Intention, squirming blue and green, and in the other a young girl coming home from a date with an enlisted American on the sprawling grey base. He shoved each into his mouth like two legs of one golden chicken.
    On Blue Street, he ate hats, belts, rice-cookers, kerosene lamps, light bulbs, expensive Italian shoes, the Grocers of Perfect Balance, aquariums, streetlamps, Prostitutes of Pure Mind, the Motorcycles of Holy Judgment. Rafu wrinkled her new nose and clapped her screen-arms.
    “Is this what you are like, on the inside?” she said.
    “This is what everyone is like on the inside,” I sighed.
    “It’s not what I’m like!”
    “That is because you are new. You did not have a stomach for one hundred years. You are only just learning how to fill it. You do not yet know it can never be filled.”
    Just ahead of us, the dream-Gabriel unhinged his jaw and swallowed a drink machine. It expired with a red whine.
    “Will he eat us all?”
    “Yes,” I said calmly. “He is a dream; he does not know this is not a dream. His real self is somewhere impossibly hot, dreaming of his soft, plain wife who is not named after a First Lady. He eats up the world with a grey boat and a fine cap. Dreams are more literal. More honest.”
    “Why are you not afraid?”
    “Because I know a thing about the Pure Land he does not.”
    Rafu took my tapir-form into her screen arms and kissed my ardent snout. I unfolded