myth for paw paw

Rebecca was, for all intents and purposes, Ivy’s mother. She taught him how the world worked while keeping him in the home of vines - of ivy - that kept him safe on the fallow fields where the sun drew its last breath every evening, far away from the grass men and their city.

As Pearl had promised, she only had one more lesson to give her son.

This was more of a warning, a threat even. She left him a paw paw tree.

“The most powerful thing in the world,” she said. “Is a story. You must be written in stories. The wisest remember they are only safe if they extend beyond themselves. When you are not seen you become nothing better than a fly or dirt. When you are seen you are hidden. Do you understand me?

Rebecca will tell you all the stories and you will need to understand who you will become.

When the paw paw you will known who are because all of the stories will fester inside you. You will bloom like the paw paw tree, and when it is time, you will become like the fruit. You will give to this place, things they cannot yet imagine. In the meantime, leave and become a legend so big you are traced by people in the constellations. When the paw paws ripen you take one and you leave here. Don’t eat it until you can’t see these fields of wheat. You’ll come back someday. I know”

That evening his mother left. Her fist was clenched. It was the last time he would see her and somewhere in her heart, she knew.

Three winters passed. Maybe more. And the cold of that final winter was beyond telling. Rebecca had become depressed, stories seemed to have drained from her mind, her family all but gone, only ivy, and she knew he too would have to leave - and then what, what of her? The workers in the limestone quarry were exhausted. The grass people were bored. It seemed Sweetie would never return, and the undead continued to walk around silently, doing nothing, feeling nothing, saying nothing.

The young man sat under his paw paw tree in a midwinter thaw. The branches hung down and rested on his shoulders. At once he smelled something strange and old, a rotting thing perhaps, a small hand reaching out of the ground, an old hand - or was that a plant? It was a sundew, opening out with a shocking red sheen. Struggling against the sheen was a fly. A hard black seed of an idea came to him then. The future of brilliance and sweetness, of riches he could not imagine, surrounding him and softening his world with admiration were to come. But he did not think about those things. He thought about the fly, struggling and the way the branches scratched his back. And sat - just a boy, looking out from his cove of ivy embraced by a small tree his mother left him.