Here’s some deadwood resurrected into myth:
The thing squats there in the mudflats like prophecy rotting in real-time, all salt-bleached femurs and vertebrae of piers that gave up the ghost decades ago. We dragged this trash out of the bay’s digestive tract and said, “Yeah, this is how you sneak doom into a city.” Driftwood. The ocean’s cigarette butts. And now it’s standing there, hollow-bellied and waiting, because that’s what theater demands, that we build our nightmares actual-size and walk right into them.
Sophocles knew the con. Put a gift outside the gates, make it too good to refuse, watch everyone line up to haul their own destruction inside. And here’s the beautiful sick joke: this horse isn’t even virgin lumber. It’s already been something else, warehouse bones, dock splinters, boat ribs, already failed at its first job. Waste repurposed into warning. The bay spat it back and we said, “Perfect. Let’s make it mean something.”
That’s the thing about trash achieving sentience. It understands betrayal on a molecular level. Every plank remembers being abandoned, left to the tide’s mercy, then yanked back into relevance. Site-responsive, we call it. As if the site had a choice. The mudflats don’t want this monument to duplicity any more than Troy wanted Greeks gift-wrapped in carpentry. But here we are. Here it is. Proof that even garbage gets a second act if the story’s good enough.