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

Perfect Balance, aquariums, streetlamps, Prostitutes of Pure Mind, the Motorcycles of Holy Judgment. The Seven Goddesses of Perfect Chance. They burst from him in his weakness—and burst through the body of Rafu, which was no more than silk, not really, leaving her skin hanging, ragged, torn threads fluttering in the breeze of falling silver.
THEN I WOKE UP
    It was only a dream. Sometimes they say that, at the end of stories, in the land where Milo was born. And then I woke up—it was only a dream.
    Stories here do not end like that. I cannot wake up. I do not sleep.
    Milo cannot wake up. If she could, she would see in her house: a low table of red wood, several windows, a television, chocolate, a peach, a salmon rice-ball, and her friend Chieko’s screen, shattered as though a cannonball had struck it, in a broken pile on the tatami. If she could wake up, she would have to get a new one—they can always get a new anything, these humans.
    Only you can wake up, out of all of us, and be relieved. You can assure yourself that we never really existed, that Yokosuka is only a broken old military town, that folding screens never speak with voices like thread spooling. I will leave it all intact for you.
    I am fasting now, anyway. I have my penance to pay.
    Yet eating dreams is an essential act of waste management in the Paradise of the Pure Land. I did my duty. I swallowed the wreckage of the dream-vomit I spilled out of myself, and also the wreckage of Milo, sodden with seawater. I cleaned everything up, don’t you see? It’s all just the way it was before.
    On the 6:17 commuter train, Yatsuhashi told me a joke about a geisha who wouldn’t wear her wig. It rambled and was not funny. Yatsuhashi-san is an idiot. The apartment above Blue Street is empty because she is gone. She was never here, of course—I never brought her to my threshold, I never served her tea with the exquisite abasement of which I am capable. I never showed her the jellyfish. But once there was a glowing cord between our houses, hers tatami-golden and tall, just down the hill from Anjinsuka Station, mine clean and neat as dreams cannot be, polished with a spongey, devoted snout. But in dreams, one can feel the absence of a thing that never was, and so can I.
    Rafu will never come here now; the emptiness is permanent.
    The Paradise of the Pure Land remains. It is bigger than all of us and notices nothing. It sprawls by the sea, a reef of light, and as I trundle down the leaf-strewn length of Blue Street, the whole of the Pure Land turns to you as if to say something, something important, something profound.
    And then you wake up. After all, it is only a dream.

GHOSTS OF GUNKANJIMA
    Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island, is a tiny island in Nagasaki Prefecture on which coal was discovered in 1810. A boom followed, and the island was heavily populated and owned from seabed to rooftop by the Mitsubishi Corporation. At one point it was the single most densely populated area on the planet, before or since. Everything was imported to the island, including building materials—not even a blade of grass grew there. Japan’s first concrete buildings were erected to house workers, who tunneled deep under the sea to find the vital coal. Eventually overpopulation and dwindling output began the island’s decline—in 1974 it was permanently closed by Mitsubishi Corp. All remaining workers were sent elsewhere. Today, it is forbidden to all visitors and is being slowly reclaimed by nature.
    During WWII, some 1,300 Chinese and Korean slave laborers died there.
    The wind here always tasted like metal.
    Xiao, Xiao, come to bed. The stair-ferns are soft; the stars are coming through the walls like mice.
    * * *
    The wind here always tasted of metal, steel come clattering up through the rotten slats of the bridges.
    Xiao, the mushrooms have made pillows of the tatami—lay your head next to mine and stop this. No good comes from remembering it.
    The wind here always tasted of