First of all, I’m posing drabbles on Tuesday now because Mondays are kind of atrocious with my workload. I hate changing my schedule for anything, but I sincerely doubt that anybody is going to raise a fuss about me changing the day I post a hundred-word story to my personal blog, so, you know. If you’re going to raise a fuss about it, tough.

I can’t get enough of reading creation stories. I love reading about how cultures explain their own existence–where we come from and how we got to where we are is a fascinating story with or without myth. My favorites are the ones that involve trickery, the ones where all of humanity springs from a devious joke or some kind of seedy beginning.

Because even more than creation stories, I like tales of rebuilding. I like the stories where we’ve been utterly destroyed–whether by ourselves or by an outside force–and we put ourselves back together, better than we were before. There’s hope in that; hope you don’t find in your average dystopian story, the thinly veiled allegory for how, if we don’t get our act together, the world will end in violence. Those stories have their place too, to warn us of what can happen–but I like to know what we learn, what we’ll do better next time.

Sometimes you have to burn it all down to start again, but I like the building part better.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

AUTOCHTHON

(Noun: from Greek auto, meaning “self” and khthon “land, earth, soil”)

Aborigines or natives – literally meaning sprung from the earth.

When the first of their kind clawed their way out of the earth, they were little more than shapeless lumps of clay. Weathered by wind and rain, they took on new shapes, flexing their fingers and shaking dirt from their limbs.

They carved eyes to see through and tongues to speak with and ears to listen to one another’s words. They were not beautiful things, but they carved lines into their bodies and marked themselves and one another as individuals.

Each bore dimples and marks, depressions on their bodies for each thing they touched, and each thing that touched them.