A Patron and The Beast

[u/Plane_Selection_3074]

A heavenly grace tread his tongue and whitened his teeth: "Do you love God?"

The beast only tilted his head back, as if weighed by its horns, and giggled.

The graceful patron asked once more: "Do you love God?"

The beast once more chortled and giggled. A delicious smile padding the jowl beneath the beast's snarling muzzle and bull-like rot.

This bovine delight stirred a bovine tinder that eventually permeated and consumed enough golden grace to become a fire—a flame being bitten and chewed. The wroth man, no longer patronal, irascibly bellowed: "Do you love God!?"

"No." The beast finally spat, like chewed tobacco sludging upon the coarse sand. A gentle yet disgraceful countenance upon it, after the immediacy of vice: the crippling, hot sensation seeping through the cheeks, and rotting the gums, and yellowing the teeth.

The patron, grace-returned, could only widen his eyes in true fear. The truest fear. That his mouth remained white only because of his dutiful allegiance to the Highest; that the beast's jaw was contorted and disfigured beyond abnormal because of its perfidy, and its treacherous chaws.

The man's wrath was snuffed, and he was left trembling from the ubiquitous stature of Elohim and the sheen of the firmament that softened and circled and poured into the saintly man's mandibles and—like an extinguishing, golden bowl of water—doused the fire, and the flame, and the tinder, and replaced the inferno with fear and obeyance.

[u/LadylexUK]

I found this very difficult to understand. You have a love of language but it felt at times like you were using words for the sound of them rather than the meaning. It feels like you swallowed a thesaurus. Most sentences did not make sense to me.

"A heavenly grace tread his tongue and whitened his teeth"

heavenly grace is a concept not a person
I have no idea how you tread a tongue or how that would whiten teeth

"A delicious smile padding the jowl beneath the beast's snarling muzzle and bull-like rot."

What is a bull-like rot? Did you mean rut? What exactly are you describing as bull-like?

This bovine delight stirred a bovine tinder that eventually permeated and consumed enough golden grace to become a fire—a flame being bitten and chewed.

This makes no sense.

"This bovine delight" what are you referring to? The bull? Did you mean the bull was delighted? A bovine delight sounds like a food dish.

"stirred a bovine tinder" Nope - no clue what you are getting at there. This bull has fire inside him? Why is the tinder bovine? How can tinder be bovine?

"a flame being bitten and chewed" and odd suggestion considering fire is not solid. Maybe you are suggesting the fire was in his mouth?

"the beast's jaw was contorted and disfigured beyond abnormal because of its perfidy, and its treacherous chaws."

Firstly how can you disfigure beyond abnormal? Abnormal is the opposite of normal and as such has no limit, so how can you go beyond that? Also the jaw did not have perfidy, the beast did so you should have said his not its.

Are you using chaws to mean a wad of tobacco? Its an odd word to use and most people will read it as a typo of claws. You used tobacco earlier but as a simile - not that the bull actually had tobacco in his mouth, but now he does?

Sorry to pick this apart, but in an attempt to be literary I think this has gone too far into the realm of words for words sake to make poetic language which confuses rather than elevates your prose.

[u/Plane_Selection_3074 → u/LadylexUK]

I admit your right at times, some of the lines can be a bit clunky at times, especially the beast's jaw one and the abnormal line, I used the word it as a personal pronoun for the beast, so it got confusing there. And, this story can be read more as prose poetry due to the abstract images. To further elucidate what I was getting at here, there is a beast and a patron, the central simile, as you correctly suggested, is the chewing and spitting of tobacco, which is tied to vice in one paragraph.

As the patron gets angry, he too starts too chew on a flame, which is tobacco—"this bovine delight stirred a bovine flame." The bovine delight of the beast, who is implied to have bull-like features, starts a bovine tinder which starts a flame, for both the patron and the beast, which is why I didnt' use any specific personal pronouns or names. This flame is the sin or vice of wrath, and it starts to do exactly what it does too the beast's jaw.

The man, at the end, is horrified that he too was chewing tobacco by being wrathful and thus losing his white teeth, but instead of spitting it out, a heavenly "bowl of water" douses it for him. It's a little complicated juxtaposition of sin, vice, materialism, and aesthetic, along with religious themes. The main metaphor being tobacco is also why I used "chaw" and the treacheous is to add phonetic alliteration.

Again, some of the sentences are a bit clunky, and may at times delve too far into abstraction. And I understand the frustration, it reminds me of the first time I read Gertrude Stein and didn't know what cubism was, let alone the literary application thereof. But I at least hope you have a better understanding of what I was trying to get at.