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In the year that they rented the Los Angeles apartment
with turn of the century plumbing,
when her hair was cropped short, the bleach rinsed out,
when he still read Fitzgerald,
they had given up hope of a child.
I appeared without warning,
like the samurai Momotaro, who floated up
into his mother’s Tuesday washing
packed into the pulpy womb of a yellow peach.
And like him, I also cried out to my father:
Wait, wait!
when he thoughtlessly drew a knife from the kitchen drawer
to slice the fruit in quarters.
It would be nice to think that he paused,
listening to my sugar-buried exhortation,
that I sprang from the bed of wet gold
in a helmet of antlers and a bamboo kusazuri.
If I had leapt from the honey-bed and kissed my mother’s ear,
then I, too, might have given bean-dumplings
to the monkey,
the pheasant,
the spotted dog.
We might have gone together, then,
trampling the grass with filial feet.
We might have built a raft of palm fronds, held fast
by a paste of betel and coconut,
and sailing across the water,
we would have slaughtered in seven clean strokes
the giants of Ogre Island,
whose flesh was red,
and blue,
and black.
I would have brought home to them the magic hammer,
which produced gold whenever it struck the earth.
Perhaps the peach-musculature muffled my voice,
or perhaps their neighbor, who had lived alone
in her little room for 50 years,
was playing the piano again,
her foot death-heavy on the reverberating pedal--
but my father cut the peach with two clean strokes,
each slice falling onto the cutting board at the same moment
like four wasting moons.
kuzasuri: the traditional armored skirt of the Samurai
Catherynne M. Valente holds a BA in Classical Studies with an emphasis in Ancient Greek Linguistics from the University of California, San Diego. She received a special commendation for service in the arts from the California State University system in 2003. Her first chapbook, Music of a Proto-Suicide, was published in early 2004, and her first novel, The Labyrinth, in October 2004. The Book of Dreams, her second book of fiction, is scheduled for release in February 2005. She currently resides in Yokosuka, Japan.
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