Inventory of a Universe, Ending
Sky, blue, wheeling clouds.
The raucous cry of gulls, off toward Stinson Beach.
The smoking hull of the Caddy, its rear windscreen shattered, its erstwhile occupants scattered.
Soft patches of flowers amongst the scrub that streaks the hillside.
A few smears of blood.
Ruts from the tires, now shredded rubber.
A million pieces of broken glass, pebbled, catching sunlight like diamonds misted with last breath.
All the fallen eucalyptus buttons that ever were.
A girl with a child in her arms.
The child's broken teeth, scattered, someday to become dust, like the child, or dragons in the girl's memory.
I love that phrase.
Which mythical creature was it whose teeth, if sown in a fertile field, grew into monsters?
Kind of like that.
FYI -- I'm buried under a pile of work, but I'll have the new challenge up shortly.
Which mythical creature was it whose teeth, if sown in a fertile field, grew into monsters?
Cadmus slew a dragon, and sowed its teeth in the ground, on orders from the gods. The teeth sprang up into warriors, who attacked each other; when only the toughest five were left alive, Cadmus nursed them back to health and led them in founding Greece.
That's the only teeth = seeds = something other than a plant story in my repertoire, but I'm sure there are others. (Actually, there's Momotaro, where a baby is born from a peach pit, but there aren't any teeth to start that story.)
That's the one I was thinking of Nutty. I haven't read any mythology in such a long time, I'd forgotten the particulars.
Yep, Cadmus. I mentally pegged the metaphor as a negative, possibly because I first heard it as a kid, and it struck me as horrific: something that couldn't be killed, that if you planted dead bits of it, things grew.
Isn't it weird, how things transpose in our heads, and stay that way?
If plants I'd planted turned out to bear weapons and yell and chop at things, I would call that monstrous. (I don't know why they attacked each other instead of Cadmus; and while there is the overall positive outcome of founding Greece, I think there's plenty of potential for ugly subtext in the course of the story.)
And then there is the hydra, with the whole "cut off one head, and get two back!" I think they could only be worse if each decapitated head grew a whole new
body,
so by the end you were fighting 100 hydras. Actually, I am sure a video game somewhere has created just such a scenario.
Nutty, I do remember reading the hydra myth at about aged 12 or so, and wondering "Why didn't they just get flamethrowers?"
Man, I love metaphors, even when they bite my arse.
