Among Us - Revised & Compiled Chapters 1 + 2
Among Us
The book trembled in his hands. Clouded eyes squinted hard over half-moon spectacles at the words on the page. They seemed to him like tiny, dancing droplets of ink swaying to and fro with each tremor of age that rocked his frail body. His cheeks were unseemly rosy, as if infused with the joys of holiday festivities and lifetimes of reverie. The deep, splintering wrinkles that creased his face echoed the laughter of ages. This man read with a purpose. He spoke the words aloud and each syllable fell from his lips like morning dew from a blade of grass. In the cadence of his speech swarmed hives of stinging things, rolling thunder, and soft breezes through dandelion petals. The tympanic throbbing of his ancient heart kept time, marking the sonorous timber of his voice.
His audience was enthralled. Pairs of eyes peered into his, always searching their depths for an ending and finding only infinity. In a circle around him they stood. To the casual passerby, the scene might prove alarming. Here sat this elderly thing with brittle bones and craggy countenance, dwarfed by innumerable shadowy titans. Their unholy visages leering languidly at this embodiment of debility. But prudence reveals wonders. In each gawking face is reflected an awe and reverence unmatched in the mortal world. Beyond the human ploy of morbid fascination or pure existential terror, these faces expressed the most pure of emotions in existence: immeasurable, unconditional love. No fear. No expectation. No punishment. No reward.
The most diminutive of these shadow beasts held the most sought-after position, directly in front of the lector. This small but imposing figure seemed to coil in on himself endlessly. His lidless eyes gaped, flashing like a guttering flame in the gloom. He inched forward, the others glancing at him, questioning. When he approached the old man’s knobby feet his reading stopped. The words hung in the air for a moment before descending like ashes into the darkness.
“What would you like to know, son?” The old man smiled and closed the book. It rested in his lap, apparently exhausted from being read one too many times.
Leviathan, the diminutive one, placed his pale hands in the lap of his father and joined palms with him. “I have asked and you have answered. Yet I ask again: why must you walk among them and not before them? Why trail the clamor of progress rather than lead it?”
“For that, my son, I have you. Your brothers and sisters are my hands in this world. They are my feet, my eyes, my ears.” The aged one leaned back in his chair, shrinking into the wood with fatigue, the weight of eternity resting on his chest. “I am content.”
“Must we leave again? Can’t we stay by your side?” It was a plea made more pitiful by the monstrousness of its messenger.
But the old man sighed. “There is much to be done. You are young. You are more powerful than I. You must go.”
Leviathan turned to his siblings, sweeping his serpentine gaze across the lot of them. The great beasts sighed their disappointment. “I tried.” Leviathan said as he led them away.
Alone in the dim now, the elderly man clutched his book to his breast and began to recite its story from memory. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth…”
1
It was good. The great vastness before him was now pocketed with creation. Molecules buzzed past, ferociously filling the newness, binding together and bursting apart. Everything expanding and contracting, silence and pandemonium. He was the apex. The universe fled from him and begged him to follow. Each breadth of distance too far from the center clamoring to get back. It breathed, this hollow place, it lived. He had made it live. It expanded to accommodate his greatness, its life a consequence of his.
Through the glorious, spiraling chaos, a small thing floated past him. A small speck of a thing, round and ridiculous and intriguing. He plucked it out of the air. It felt warm to the touch. Not the warmth of combustion, but the warmth of a new life waiting to be born. There was light on this thing as it circled its sun, and darkness too. There were oceans and valleys and forests. There were peacocks and pillbugs and poppy seeds. This small thing in his hands made him dizzy with possibilities. What if there was an answer in this little zygote of a world? With care and caution he summoned forth a creature out of the clay. Its body was yet formless but its mind was razor sharp. He poured into it all of his questions, all of his longings. He gave it all of himself and his greatness, and asked it to give him form. The creature writhed. It pulled and shook and screamed from a lipless face and a lungless chest until finally it lay panting on the ground. Sweat-soaked and shivering it quivered in the mud. And he stood beside it, thrilled and horrified at what he had done.
There were round orbs through which he could see and long limbs from which dangled appendages made to grasp and claw and create. He blinked, newborn, at everything around him, once so small and now massive and enveloping. There could be nothing beyond the horizon, nothing above the clouds. And yet he knew there was. A groan from behind him drew his attention to the creature who had given him form just as he had given it life. As he looked into the mirror image of himself, the man-child fell to its knees. He regarded its crude genuflections for a moment before saying “stop.” The word vibrated up through his throat, tickling his tongue as it exited his mouth.
The new man balked. “Are you not my master?”
“You are my child.” He held open his arms and waited for an embrace that never came.
“I am no child.” The man spat. “There is power running through me. Can you control that power?”
He shook his head, marveling at the courage and arrogance his creation emanated.
“Then you are useless to me.”
Adam turned abruptly and left him standing alone in the mud.
He watched Adam for weeks, hiding in the shade of trees or under the cover of night. Always from a distance. The man tore through the world with brute strength and bent its creatures to his will. On the second day, Adam found a fawn nosing at a patch of sparse grass on the plains. It welcomed him openly to share in its find. He snapped its neck and dragged it, bleeding, into the woods. On the fifteenth day he came across a tree whose fruit had over ripened and fallen to the ground. Rather than pick through the rotting vegetation, Adam eyed the last fruit that still clung to the tallest branch. The tree bent the branch towards him, creaking happily. After he had plucked the fruit, he tore the branch from the tree and fashioned a spear.
Each night as Adam lay in sleep, he whined and screamed and tore at his flesh with dirty fingernails. He was in agony. On one such night, He crept into the firelight’s glow and touched the ground beside Adam’s head. The last of His strength was sapped as a new figure emerged from the earth, softer and smaller than before. She lay, in sleep as Adam did. Her breathing soft and rhythmic. There was a calm about her and yet, He felt, the same stirring of chaos grew in her as it had in Adam.
In the morning when they woke to find kindred flesh, they wrested and writhed with each other, relishing in the union of their bodies. Together they moved over the earth violently. He was overwhelmed. What could be done? Why did these beings crave conflict so?
Each morning they rose to ravish the land and each night, before repose, they ravished one another. Eve’s belly grew wider, her voice deeper as she cried out in pain. He had witnessed birth countless times among the creatures of this world, but none of them were as animal as this. Her body was a temple of sweat and blood. Her fragile neck and painted mouth released bellows that shook the leaves from the trees. Screams and suffering. And then, in a pool beneath her body, racked with cries of agony and ecstasy, a stubby root squirmed in the mud. She grasped its lifeline and tore through it with her teeth, spitting as she went and splattering the earth with the carnage of life.
The baby was lifted from the dirt and, as it was, it began to scream. The trees shuddered at the sound. The lions bowed their heads.
Eve scrubbed the boychild clean in the waters of a lake. Pink flesh peaked out from below the squalor of birth. The child glowed with its newness. As she was bathing him, He approached cautiously. The baby stared, glassy eyed, at what it could not yet see. Eve glared as He grew nearer, holding the baby closer to her chest, not for protection, but possession. He held out his hands, hoping to touch the child, hoping to let it know that it was loved.
But then Adam came. He was dressed in the skin of an ox and he held aloft a similar garment for his bride and his son. He glowered at his Father and turned his head away in shame.
“You do not hide your carnality.” Adam said, indicating the loincloth at his waist.
He looked down at his body, at the dancing muscles and the coarse black hairs that drifted and curled across the landscape of His skin. “What is there to hide and who from? We are all of one place, each creation a consequence of the last.”
But His children did not answer. He realized that night, as He watched them revel in their physical forms, that it was from themselves that they hid. The burning within them frightened them as much as it fascinated Him, and so they covered it up, with skins and cloths and words.
2
The young man tilled the field in the silent midmorning sun. The earth was his wife, his plowshare her lover. He toiled in the light but his thoughts were cast in shadow. Some distance away, the bleating of lambs pierced his flesh like a dagger. Havel waved to his somber brother from the hilltop where he stood watch over his flock. Qayin could not abide the gesture of familiarity. He turned away and continued his work in the field.
In the thatched home they shared that night, Adam praised the work of his youngest son as the drippings of the tender meat dribbled down his chin. The barley sat in the corner, untouched. When the lure of flesh was present, why would anyone need the fruits of the earth? These were the thoughts Qayin had as he fingered the bare bones left on the table.
Havel was aglow in the warmth of praise. The younger son grew in joy and in love. His skin a golden testament to the blessing of his birth. His sun-kissed hair flowered above his brow, a crown of curls that put young maidens to shame.
Qayin scratched at his own skin, sallow and muddy, the color of dried husks left in the field to be borne away by the wind. From the moment he’d left his mother’s breast to crawl and tumble across the warm earth, he’d known it was the only place he belonged. In the dust, in the mud, in womb of the planet as it swirled through the heavens.
When Havel had come of age, he’d found a youngling lamb, lost and frightened. He’d tied a braided length of rope about its neck and dragged it home to play with. When his belly began to rumble, he slit its throat and threw it on the fire while his father watched with a smile. Qayin had no want of such things and this brought sorrow and shame to his parents. Only a child squabbles with the dirt, a man sees what he wants and takes it. This was the lesson Adam beat into his son. But Qayin crawled on his belly and dug in the dirt. When seeds spilled from the lips of is family, he gathered them and secreted them away, deep in the earth. After years of wandering and pillaging, the family rested in the shadow of a great mountain. The ground there was rich with the smell of sulpher and it tingled Qayin’s skin. He tilled the soil and scattered his seeds. Small green shoots burst from the ground, gleaming and waving with the passing breeze. It seemed to Qayin that they were smiling at him; he had given them life.
The fruits of his labor were plentiful and soon the family had little choice but to remain and enjoy them. Yet even in his success, he failed. His brother’s lust for flesh and blood usurped his passion for the soil and every man who passed by their camp marveled at the tender flesh of lamb and ox and pheasant Havel presented to them. The smells of bubbling fat and charred skin turned Qayin’s stomach.
Each night, in the glow of starlight, Qayin kneeled over his brother. His long, calloused fingers clamped into fists, the strain embossed upon his arms by throbbing veins. The wetness on his cheeks betrayed his conviction and he lay back upon his cot, confused and alone.
It was nigh on time to present a sacrifice to the Almighty God and receive His blessings in kind. Havel had slaughtered a calf and laid it before the family’s altar. Qayin placed a woven basket of roots and figs.
The next morning the stench in the house was palpable. The fruit had rotted and was crawling with insects. The calf, resting as though in sleep, remained pristine.
The sentence was passed. In the hush of the dawn a blade was drawn. A death passed silently into the morn. Havel lay, broken, silhouetted in blood.
As Qayin fled across his beloved fields, he spotted a man approaching him. The man’s arms were outstretched, palms open. The two faced each other, Qayin panting, the man sad-eyed and questioning.
He only spoke one word. “Why?”
Between the shrilling of his lungs as they strained for air, Qayin spoke in a breathless whisper. “What must I do? What must I do for love? Am I cursed?”
A chill descended on the earth. Even the wind was silent. He could feel His throbbing heart crumple in His chest as He saw in Qayin the warped and wronged vision of Himself. The young man staggered away from Him on shaking legs, his body wracked with wretched sobs. Try as he might, for the rest of his days, the earth would no longer bear him fruit. And each fragile sprout that he touched withered and died, in shame.