/lit/ - Literature

Hunkering on a mossbank spearing fish in the tide pools, he met himself in the silvered water and knelt astounded before the changes. He had his mother's high, solemn cheekbones and small, docile ears close to his head. With horror he observed that his nose had grown long and straight — the big nose of a swamp monkey and not the flat, broad, and beautiful nose of the forest people.
"You will never eat if you are waiting to spear your nose," Jabalwan chided, coming out of the forest.
"I am truly ugly, teacher," Matu groaned.
"The uglier the sorcerer, the greater his power. You will be less tempted by women — for they will certainly not seek you out with a nose like yours. And good riddance," the soul-catcher quickly added, seeing the consternation on the youth's face. "You belong to no tribe now. The Rain Wanderers have no claim to you anymore. You are a sorcerer, and so you are married to yourself. Your wife is the stately sky. She is naked only to your gaze."
Matu heard this with alarm. In the weeks since his initiation by the Spider he had endured his first emergencies of lust. Dreams of Riri, her naked, dusk-colored body, polluted his sleep. He would wake fevered, laminated in cold sweat, and could return to sleep only after touching himself where the heat of her body still gripped his wakefulness. Orgasm only deepened the dreams. Alone in the forest, while Jabalwan sewed feather-fins to his cane arrows or sat chewing roots, entranced by the sky's tapestry, Matu thought of Riri and stroked himself until his seed flew from him and peace soft as the inside of a cloud filled his limbs. "Only the sky will be my wife?" he asked Jabalwan. "I will never have a woman?"
"You are a sorcerer," the soul-catcher said in a gust of laughter. "What woman would want a sorcerer? We have no tribe. Our life is endless wandering without roof or garden. Who would protect our wives and children while we hunt? We would have to build longhouses and pigpens and paddies. There would be no time for cloudreading or healing those who need us."