myth for swamp dodder

The sky was always cloudy. Sun shone through, but it seemed that since industry began there was a dull covering over the place.

In the house that Sweetie’s mother built, no more wood than moss and mud, Pearl’s baby wondered at the world from newborn eyes. He cooed and garbled as language swirled around him, and the texture and colors that make up the world began to make little maps in his mind. He didn’t know a cloudy sky from a clear one. But over time he understood something about the air, reaching into it, watching it with new eyes. Toddlers see many strange things, but Pearl’s baby seemed to consistently gazed and express at something right above him.

Sweetie’s mother watched him as he lay in Pearl’s arms and, despite herself, she wondered if he saw something she didn’t. So she gazed at the spot the little boy was so intent on. She saw something move. It was the pale end of something, nearly translucent. But when she caught it in her gaze her eyes adjusted to its movements. It played in the air in front of the little boy’s face, making funny shapes, jumping and dancing. How had she not seen this before. With some concentration she saw how it was not simply flying in the air above him, but suspended.

Not even Pearl had seen it. But now the two of them marveled as they saw the thread revealing itself all around them. It twisted around chairs and door handles. It hugged the poor tattered bird flowers outside, and even tangled in their own hair. They saw as it lifted up in thousands of places from the land, every thread making up the cover that lay so thinly but certainly lay over their heads in an invisible netting that surrounded their town - which was slowly becoming a small city.

Pearl remained with her infant holding the string as the second, older mother made her way into the streets with her knife, following the path the thread made near and far, all around the town.

The town was now build up like sand castles, buildings were both old and new, repurposed and then built upon. Shapes stacked upon one another making streets around them jagged. But the grass people enjoyed meeting and spreading out, so though they were jagged, the streets were big and open, with not many places to hide - which was the danger Sweetie’s mother was risking - to be seen when she should be on her way to work.

And then she saw through a small window, the place where the thread was coming from, a grass man sat there, pale, and looking out of a window beyond. And in his hands were tools with which he wove the invisible tiny threads. She could feel his pain, the shock he felt, the surprise after she threw her knife at his foot. She knew in that moment that she would never get the knife, that the knife might be her own death sentence.

In that very moment, Sweetie had been looking for paths to escape, keeping the milk white flower in a glass container. And then, at once, the thread unwound as quickly as a frayed sweater, and the sunlight shone through. Sweetie escaped the town with her mother’s swift and certain action. She knew she would come back, but everything would be different then.