Tag: myth

Escaping the Fire

~ Richard Schulte ~ Leave a comment

It was something you don’t see. Not during winter in the city. Phil and I paused for a moment on the icy sidewalk. A small yellow butterfly fluttered around a trashcan.

Phil stared at the yellow sulphur butterfly. He seemed mesmerized.

How, I wondered, did this fragile thing survive the deadly cold?

I thought of an artist friend I knew. She once told me yellow butterflies are called sulphurs for a reason. They’re spirits who’ve escaped from the fire and brimstone of hell. The spirits escape damnation through a sly transformation–by disguising themselves as splashes of burning sulphur. Fleeing hell, they rise up, up, back into the living world as bright, yellow butterflies.

Pointing at the butterfly, I interrupted Phil’s reverie.

I recounted my artist friend’s crazy assertion.

“Sure, nice story, but eventually all things become ash. Even butterflies. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

“You miss the point. Escaping the fire is what matters.”

What the Giant Saw

~ Richard Schulte ~ 1 Comment

According to ancient legend, a giant had piled rocks on the bank of the river, creating a dark mountain. The mountain was a cairn, placed by the giant so that one day he could find his way back from the frozen North, to take revenge on the knights of old.

One morning the returning giant suddenly appeared over the mountain. He placed his hairy hand atop the rocky peak and sat down, cooling his feet in the trickle of river.

“What’s this?” he asked with a voice like thunder.

Across the river there had been a strange change. The castle had vanished. No knights in bright armor charged out to meet him.

Before him lay a postpostmodern city. Ant-size automated cars traversed a network of unpeopled streets, moving in straight lines from one point to another, then to another, then to another, then to another. The self-driving cars moved with perfect regularity between rows of identical, windowless edifices. The pod-like cars were also windowless, designed to deflect dangerous sunlight and conserve precious energy. They transported their minuscule cargoes with perfected efficiency.

The giant stared for a few minutes at the lifeless scene. None of it seemed real.

He soon lost interest.

As he stood up to return north, the clumsy giant accidentally knocked down a stone from the top of his useless cairn.

The catastrophic flood was beyond understanding.