Soup: An Allegory

By Edward

Source: thedailydietribe.com

A lonely pot rests on a gas stove.  Circular, steel, and heavy, the pot resembles any other of its kind in the house.  Metal forks, wooden spoons, and children’s heads have taken their toll on its once gleaming silver surface; each scratch and scrape the mark of a culinary amateur, of a person who places shiny new quarters on railroad tracks.  Stoic and stately, the blind and tired pot accepts all that it receives-good, bad, hot, or cold- with dignified silence.  It knows its role.
            Flames suddenly charge from below, jetting upward in cascading peaks of blue and white.  The piercing trail they follow is from neither innate or learned experience.  Rather, they move with predictability as fate conducts their hurried dance with engineered precision.  Here, underneath the pot, the flames live out their lives in a quantum state, cursed by blue visions of youth left behind and thoughts of inescapable death.  The distance they travel is short, as are their fleeting lives.  Color betrays even the most reserved as the flames become red with anger and embarrassment; how could something so powerful be stifled in an instant?  They die before attaining enlightenment, before realizing the futility of their thoughts and struggles in light of their unknown and unchanging purpose; adolescent flickers of life.
            The pot feels the infinite cycles of life and death warming its back.  The intense heat spreads evenly along its surface, warming molecular metallic bones that begin to tingle with nostalgia, falsely expecting to return to the womb they left behind at a long forgotten forge.  The pot stretches outwards as its skeleton becomes more limber and energized, and prepares itself for the heavy contrast ahead.
            From a cup up above, clear and cool drop and droplets fall from the sky, each sphere bulging and jiggling in midair, attempting to maintain composure against the force of trillions of liberated souls: mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers.  Larger groups separate and divide to form tightly knit cliques.  They fall deeper into the bowel of the pot, where they too become excitedly warmer, and soon, the first drop touches down.  Others follow behind.  They burst out in screams of laughter and jubilation, signaling to those above that everything is fine, that ecstasy is only moments away.  The pure and innocent sounds from below entice more to follow, until wave upon wave of sparkling orbs shower down into the accepting arms of the vibrant pot.
            Inside the vessel, a disastrous reunion soon begins.  Individuals swarm aimlessly, confused and afraid as to their position.  Many times, they grab hold of someone they know only to be violently ripped away.  The lying laughs of those before are almost gone as the last of the liberated make their way to the surface.  Bubbling and ripping from the grasps of the jealous and bitter, they fight their way through once eager throngs until they pierce the watery Maginot line and whisper a sigh of relief, which quickly dissipates into the air.
            An entangled maze of dried noodles comes crashing down into the water, splashing some lucky souls onto the sides of the pot.  Immediately, the crackling noodles try to entice, but to no avail, for all know that behind the tangles and turns of the yellowy white lines is an unquenchable mind that blindly and ravenously grabs at whatever it can take.  It begins to gobble up those around, becoming larger and larger, bloated with pride, and soon, the noodles become transparent with the watery bodies of its victims.  The noodles spread their tentacle reach throughout the pot, climbing over and between its stochastic jumble of limbs. A red powder falls from the sky and dusts the top of the noodles, coloring the water blood red.  Tumors of powder stick to the noodles as it continues its undeterred and gluttonous rampage.  While the majority below remain static with terror, the confused and fortunate souls that were scattered onto the sides of the pot can feel themselves getting hotter and lighter until they ashamedly disappear into the air without a sound.
            The pot does its best to save as many as it can, but it knows, having been spectator before, who the victor will be.  Attempting compassion, the pot gives every morsel of heat received to the water.  Countless numbers rise through the red tides into freedom, the boiling and bubbling cheers of the liberated echo off the steel walls.  Immense sighs of relief condense above the pot and spread warmth throughout the room.  And yet, even after the flames below the pot are all but extinct, the noodles continue to gorge.
            The lonely pot rests on the gas stove.  It feels its own heat evaporating into the air, feels its bones contracting and becoming stiff and hardened.  With the last of its senses, it feels the great weight of the noodles leaving its body, sloshing the red water from side to side as it departs.  Some of the innocent, in a desperate effort, manage to free themselves from the noodles and fall down, bloodied and battered, back into the pot and are immediately embraced by the survivors below.
            The pot, tired and resigned, sheds no tears, offers no consolation to the bereaved nor prayers for those incarcerated in the belly of the beast.  The damage is done.  There is nothing else to do.  There is nothing else but waiting.  There is nothing else but resting.  There is nothing else but contemplating its own fate, while soaked in the stench of the metallic blood of the dead.