The Bread We Eat in Dreams

by Catherynne M. Valente

he ran like if he kept running he could escape the last thousand years. He ran like the field was his country. He ran like his bride was on the other end of all that grass and I guess she was. I guess we all were.

Justin Oster, who caught this pass that looked for all the world like the ball might have made it all the way to the Pacific if nobody stood in its way. But Justin did, and he caught it tight and perfect and the stadium shook with Devil pride. 34...

We built the night without thinking about it, without telling anyone it was going to happen, without making plans. Everyone knew to be there; no one was late.

Get any group of high school kids together and you pretty much have the building blocks of civilization.

moving her hips, her gorgeously round belly, her long corn-colored hair brushing faces as she spun by, the smell of her expensive and hot.

Sarah Jane poured her daddy’s cognac over Ashley’s breasts and caught the golden stuff spilling off in her sparkly pink mouth and Ashley laughed so high and sweet and that was it

the sun of our world arcing from hand to hand to hand.

The night was so loud in my ears. I could see it happening and it scared me but I couldn’t stop it and didn’t want to. Everything was falling apart and coming together and we’d won the game,

even though it was January the air was so warm, the crisp red and yellow leaves drifting over us all, no one sorry, no one ashamed, no one chess club or physics club or cheer squad or baseball team, just tangled up together inside our barricade of cars.

Sarah Jane grabbed Coyote’s hand which was a paw which was a hand and screamed.

Bunny Rabbit, the watcher, the queen of coming home.

the squashes cracked so loud I put my hands (which were paws which were hands) over my ears, and the babies came like harvest, like forty-five souls running after a bright ball in the sky.

And then it was the same forever, the corn stayed yellow and they stayed a bunch of white kids with scars where their cars crashed and fists struck and babies were born. The lake went dry and the scoreboard went dark.

Everyone just remembers the corn and the feeling of running, running so fast, the whole pack of us, against the rural Devil gold sunset. I call that a kindness.

my pick-up’s engine fired off in the gloam, and I know that sound like my mama’s crying.

the 16th century offered a range of options for completely covering female skin from chin to heel,

howled the primordial syllable that signified stag.

She ate her stags whole in the dark, crunching the antlers in her teeth.

Once, she called a pod of seals up out of the sea and slept on the frozen beach, their grey mottled bodies all around her. The heat of her warmed them, and they warmed her. In the morning the sand beneath them ran liquid and hot, the seals cooked and smoking.

Hell is a lot like a bad neighbor: it occupies the space just next to earth, not quite on top of it or underneath it, just to the side, on the margins. And Hell drops its chestnuts over the fence with relish.

she spoke to the trees in proto-Akkadian and they understood her; they fell and sheared themselves of needles and branches. Grasses dried in a moment and thatched themselves, eager to please her.

it made her feel like digging a hole in the dirt and hiding in it forever.

Sauve-Majeure belongs to its demon. She called the town to herself, on account of being a creature of profound order.

The demon waited for enough children to be born and grow up, for enough village to spring up, for enough order to assert itself she that could walk among them and be merely one of the growing, noisy lot of new young folk

Everything in its place, all souls accounted for, everyone blessed and punished according to strict and immutable laws. She baked bread to be seen but ultimately withheld, sweetcakes to be devoured until the skin split and the stomach protruded like the head of a child through the flesh, black pastry to haunt the starved mind.

And in her long nights, in her long house of smoke and miller’s stones, she baked the bread we eat in dreams, strangest loaves, her pies full of anguish and days long dead, her fairy-haunted gingerbread, her cakes wet with tears. The Great Duke Gusion, the Baboon-Lord of Nightmares, came to her each eve and took up her goods into his hairy arms and bore them off to the Pool of Sleep.

Shagshag, the weaver of Hell, to make her the Tea of Separation-from-God and ravage her in the dark like a good neighbor should.

A demon’s body is nothing but heart, its whole interior beating and pulsing and thundering in time to the skull-clocks of Pandemonium.

They would love her abjectly, for no other manner of loving had worth.

This relieved everyone a great deal, since a woman alone is a kind of unpredictable inferno that might at any moment light the hems of the innocent young.

Basile came home smiling in a secretive sort of way, her cheeks flushed, her breath quick and delighted.

“Be glad for ease, for it comes but seldom.” “It’s unwholesome, a woman living alone out there.

Lamentation Pole had raised his only son Troth to know only discipline and abstinence, and no other boy could begin to compete with him in devotion or self-denial.

“Go and make your gardens grow, make your men double over with desire, go and dance until you are full up of the moon.”

“A witch is just a girl who knows her mind. I am better than a witch.

Her gaze sounded upon his soul and boomed there, deafening.

there is not a demon in Hell who was not once something quite other, and more interesting. In the land where the Euphrates runs green and sweet, I was a grain-god with the head of a bull. In the rough valley of the Tyne I was a god of fertility and war, with the head of a crow. I was a fish-headed lord of plenty in the depths of the Tigris. Before language I was she-who-makes-the-harvest-come, and I rode a red boar. The earth answers when I call it by name. I know its name because we are family.”

I cannot sin, so I have done no wrong.”

that I will leave behind this horror that is flesh and become as light. Tell me I need never again be a man, that I need never err more, nor dwell in the curse of this life.

The demon looked on him with infernal pity, which is, in the end, not worth the tears it sheds.

She folded her arms around him like wings and brought down the scythe of her mouth on his. Straddling his doubt, the demon made plain the reality of his flesh, and the arrow of his need.

Father Audrien dreamed of the demon’s burning body every night until he died, and the moment her bones shattered into a thousand fiery fish, he woke up reaching for his Bible and finding nothing in the dark.

Basile Sazarin so lovely men winced to look at her,

When the shards of the demon dreamed, she dreamed of them all eating her bread together, in one house or another,

despite having the work ethic of a fat housecat.

a loaf of bread with a sugar-crust that makes her heart beat faster when she eats it. She looks forward to it all week.

“Perhaps, for one moment, only one, so quick it might pass between two beats of a sparrow’s wings, she had all her folk around her, and they ate of her table, and called her by her own name, and did not vie against the other, and for that one moment, she was joyful, and did not mourn her separation from a God she had never seen.”

pipe that sound into my copper-riveted heart, that softgirl/brightgirl/candygirl electrocheer gigglenoise

right down through the steelfrown tunnels of my all-hearing head.

Robots are like Mars: they need girls. Boys won’t do; the memesoup is all wrong. They stomp when they should kiss and they’re none too keen on having things shoved inside them.