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

into a man in her arms, to match her, to please her. I wanted so to please her.
A PERFECT SHARD OF GOLD
    There is no more sacred place in the Pure Land of Yokosuka than the pink palaces of the pachinko parlors. I would have taken Rafu there, to meditate with me in the blue haze of the electronic screens and the heady cigar smoke. Here, the bodhisattvas practice Right Gambling, prone before the unyielding goddesses of luck, their throats ecstatic and bare.
    One by one, the dream-Lieutenant ate the goddesses from the ceiling, the green-limbed seraphs of Perfect Chance, sucking their toes down into his throat. Their screams were shattered by the crash and fall of silver balls. The old, shrunken men turning the wheels of the glittering machines did not move—they see nothing of the Pure Land, even when the sun rises over the harbor and grants each citizen of the Right City a perfect shard of gold. He is a dream; I am a dream; we are all dreams, and the flashing arcade lights blind them.
    Gabriel laughed, a thick, fatty sound, a gargle, a chortle. The parlor erupted in jackpots and high scores. The goddesses who held back and gave forth at their whim had gone into his great, insatiable belly and held back no more.
    “Please,” said Rafu softly. The old men shouted for joy, jostled each other, shook fists at the perplexed proprietor. Rafu’s voice barely sounded among them, but Gabriel turned toward her in hunger, his lips scarlet with secret blood.
    “Do you remember,” said Rafu, sliding toward him, “how Milo’s toe was broken when she was six, running too fast after her friends through the forest behind her house? How it is still crooked, and aches, and how you used to rub it for her during thunderstorms until she was well? Do you remember how her waist curved so sweetly in, how her mouth tasted, how even when she had the flu she smelled like childhood to you, clean and innocent and permanent?”
    “No,” growled the dream-Gabriel.
    “Do you remember how her fingers still had calluses, even though she stopped playing the guitar so long ago? How her hair looked when it was tangled, when it was smooth? How her belly sloped, how her birthmark looked, how her ears curved?”
    “No,” growled the dream-Gabriel. “Instead, I want to eat you. Then I’ll remember those things.”
    “Why are you doing this?”
    Gabriel shrugged. “What else is there to do when you visit a foreign country?”
    He turned to bite down on a crippled old woman with a cane and a bend in her back like a stair. Her skinny arms were full of silver pachinko balls. She was winning, of course she was winning. His invisible teeth shattered on her dry old skull, scraping off her jaw. She smiled quietly to herself.
    “There is a pit in every dream that cannot be eaten,” I said to Rafu. I was so tired. This was a lesson for baby Baku. “It will break you if you try it. Naturally it is the most delicious thing in a dream, and we have all had to learn to curb our desire for it. And in the dream of the Pure Land, the dream Yokosuka dreams waking and sleeping, an old woman sits in a pachinko parlor, our indestructible core, indestructible because she does not know she is the sweetest thing in the world.”
    The dream of Gabriel was breaking apart, spilling the silver dream fluid onto the floor, shuddering, shaking, crying out for help. I did not care.
    But Rafu opened her arms to him, and ah, I should have known—we are each slaves to our own natures, even in the Paradise of the Pure Land, especially here, and if I know only how to eat, she knows only how to conceal, how to hide a thing from shame. Her arms flipped open, square screen by square screen, and she enveloped him so suddenly he could not move, clapped him up entirely in herself, all wall of golden Rafu.
    The dream-Gabriel sobbed in her grasp. The things he had devoured began to tear out of him: hats, belts, rice-cookers, kerosene lamps, light bulbs, expensive Italian shoes, the Grocers of