matthew dion

---

        He wondered what it would be like to only have 4 limbs, dry, bony, dense, meaty appendages. Could they feel the piercing cold, the delicious warmth of magma, the tickling sensation of cosmic neutrinos streaming from space through the core of the earth as if it were a pane of glass? It baffled the capacity of his imagination to dream of no longer having countless slick, writhing tentacles, each with a nearly godlike intelligence of its own, oozing bubble universes from each sucker, popping into existence only to annihilate itself after a few short eternities when it inevitably collided with its antimatter twin.

        What would it be like to move through time in only one direction, with the flow of entropy, and not to swim forward, backward, noncausalward, or Moebiusward through the slippery 8th dimension? To live like a flat worm, crawling monotonically from one end of a string to another?

         But most of all he wondered what it would be like to experience Love, the quirky biochemical, parasitic addiction that lodged deep inside the tiny human brain. He had observed Love from every conceivable angle. Psychically luring his experimental subjects into dripping, breathing caverns, he had peeled them apart, micro-layer by micro-layer, tasting every molecule, mapping out every biochemical pathway. Love was as much a part of their higher brain function as the deeper, primeval strata and brain stem. It reached downward to each cellular division. It permeated their primitive and hopelessly messy genetic material, the tireless waltz in every nucleus of perpetual winding, unwinding, tangling, and twisting.

        He wanted to Know know. And how could he without their mortality, or their misguided belief in “separateness” and “apartness” from each other that necessitated Love in the first place? Without being a creature of material instinct, of hunger, of survival, and of the tangible present, it was as comprehensible as imagining being a ladybug or a twig. Love leaked into everything. It drove them to reproduce, to keep their tribe coherent, to be tender, and to be insatiably violent when the object of their love was threatened, and when they felt threatened by the object of their love.

        When he crossed over and implanted, he demanded to be called Emmanuel, which roughly translated into human conceptual thought as "god creature with us, and within us, in our deepest organs, growing, consuming, pulsing, until it bursts dripping out of our chests, leaving behind only decimated, gaping, terrified flesh." But after he erupted from the ribcage of Mary, his surrogate mother, bones splintering and organs collapsing in sucking, squelching agony, they named him Yesh'ua instead. It was the most common name that year for newborn boys.

        The first Love Yesh’ua experienced was from his surrogate father, Joseph. He was a quiet, melancholy man, especially now that a portion of his memory was fragmented and scarred over. His mind had mercifully sealed away the trauma of witnessing a mass of teeth, spider legs, snake-like coils, and eyes emerge from his dying betrothed and coagulate into the shape of a newborn. Nevertheless, his Love for Yesh’ua and Yesh’ua’s half-siblings (for this was not the first time Joseph had been widowed) was fierce and animalistic, as one intuitively protecting his replicated genes. To wash and warm and nourish these extensions of himself began as a form of self-preservation, and matured as the objects of Joseph’s Love gradually became distinct and Other. He was willingly deceived, unconditionally inviting foreign invaders into his heart, a Trojan fully aware that the magnificent Horse contained hidden imposters, anticipating their emergence with great excitement and trepidation.

        Back when Yesh’ua was, is, and will be, multidirectionally eternal, he had sired millions, and had done so without crippling, mammalian attachment and desperation. He effortlessly filled every subterranean continent with his progeny, every blazing swirl of the earth’s core, every world between worlds. There was no biological pressure to shelter or feed or teach those he had willed into existence. Unlike Joseph, he was not propelled by billions of years of genetic mutation to see traces of himself in his son’s face. There was no inexpressible urge to pass down his chromosomes, his life’s trade, his status in his community, his superstitions and habits and traditions, his rituals and scriptures and the Mitzvah of his people.

        Yesh’ua grew in wisdom, stature, and favor. Each day he worked to scrape, splinter, and coax wood into unnatural shapes and baubles and small pieces of furniture. Each day he committed more of the Torah to memory. If “holy” means “separate, set apart, distinct,” then each day he and Joseph grew a little holier from each other. It thrilled Joseph’s heart and made him Love Yesh’ua more and more.

        One week when Yesh’ua was 12 years old, he amused himself by taking passages from the Pentateuch, rotating them perpendicularly into the fifth dimension, folding each one recursively inside itself, and then transmuting them back into human thought and speech. The Temple rabbis were revolted and horrified, so much so that they mistook the feeling for awe and wonder. Joseph had to drag Yesh’ua away from the throng of frenzied Pharisees and scribes, all ravenous to hear more as blood from ruptured capillaries in their prefrontal cortexes oozed from their ears and tear ducts.

        When the adult Yesh’ua began his own rabbinic career at the age of 30, he discovered the Love of the wretched and needy. He transubstantiated water into a fluid that the humans tasted as wine. He stretched out invisibly to push tumors and infections backwards against the gentle current of time, cells shrinking and combining until they had anti-mitosed into non-existence. He held all the countless possible loaves and fish, hanging in delicate superposition, and collapsed them into existence in the single reality where hungry crowds gathered at his feet. They were like strays who just needed their basic appetites cared for, and their simple loyalty and trust flowed as easily as salivation. Their Love and attention felt like a heady rush.

  It felt much like the Love that came from his disciples. He led them back and forth across the rugged countryside like a piper enthralling children. He carved and sculpted reality as if it were cedarwood in Joseph’s workshop, with smooth and seamless joints and flawless lacquer finish. They marveled at the wonders he brought forth.

  One disciple did not Love like a simple child. Unlike Peter and the others, John did not boldly and ignorantly declare his undying devotion to novelty, miracles, and magicians. His wit was surprising, even to a being who inhabited all possible timelines. His laugh seemed to make the Milky Way pulse and hum. John could not walk on water, or terrorize herds of pigs over cliffsides, or tell people their secret sins, but when he embraced Yesh’ua, his bosom radiated warmth. His deep sighs into Yesh’ua’s ear always seemed to say, “At last, we are each held.” John couldn’t raise anyone from the dead, and yet power would flow out from him at each touch or graze. Yesh’ua felt it course through their clasped hands, as John absentmindedly stroked Yesh’ua’s palm with his thumb.

        When they all camped homeless in a field or glen, Yesh’ua liked sleeping next to John, so that he could inhale the warm breath of life that glided in and out of John’s nostrils, like a spirit hovering over the waters.

        When Yesh’ua washed the disciples’ feet, it felt like washing children’s feet, or wiping children’s noses, or picking ticks off a beloved pet. But washing John’s feet felt like the tingle of imminent lightning.

  John’s feedback had been invaluable during the early days of Yesh’ua’s ministry. While miracles proved wildly popular, the preaching floundered. Lectures dragged on about topics like “Deliverance from Earthly Suffering, Using Simple Techniques to Inhibit the Neural Pathways Associated with Pain.” If monologues weren’t interspersed with snacks or healings (the lepers almost never said thank you), the crowd would evaporate at the first distraction.

        A particularly unsuccessful homily titled “Breaking Through the Psychic Barriers Separating Individual Human Minds Using Quantum Tunnelling” ended abruptly when an old woman’s skull partially melted during the practical demonstration. The bored and confused mob stoned Yesh’ua to death.

        Tenderly cradling Yesh’ua’s shattered body as the crowd dispersed, John mused, “My last rabbi focused all his sermons on repentance and sorrow. He baptized people in the river to wash away their sins.” John rubbed Yesh’ua’s twitching chest as the arduous resurrection process began. “Then you came along with signs and wonders. But you're dressing up the same message: 'You're broken, follow these steps and I can fix you.’” John licked his finger and used it to wipe rivulets of dried blood from Yesh’ua’s brow. Yesh’ua progressed from spasms to loud gasps as his circulatory system rebooted. “Most people are poor, hungry, thirsty, probably downtrodden, persecuted for one reason or another. Instead of encouraging them to divorce themselves from their bleak existence, why don’t you tell them that they’re blessed, just the way they are? Turn your other cheek, there’s blood on that side too.”

  John leaned his face closer as Galilean sunlight faded into dusk. “You're not going to teach these people how to handle venomous snakes or cast out demons, or how speak in the tongues of angels, or how to use their minds to throw mountains into the sea. Nobody has powers, nobody lives forever, and if nothing else gets done, we might as well love each other.” As Yesh’ua’s eyes fluttered open, the first thing he noticed was how close John’s lips were. Of all the disciples, John was the gentlest and most patient while Yesh’ua was rising again. Peter usually just shook him until he could feel a heartbeat.

        “And nobody understands when you talk about some ‘Big Bang’ at the beginning of everything,” John continued. “I’ve always imagined that in the beginning was a Word. Just one word, and that Word was Love. Or some seed that one day grew into Love.” Reanimation was pretty much finished, bone integrity restored, heart revitalized, lungs unpunctured. Why did his chest still ache, as if happiness was stabbing him in the heart?

        Shakily, Yesh’ua sat up and pressed his lips to John’s cheek, greeting him as he did each disciple after returning from a long journey from beyond the grave. This kiss, however, betrayed the emotion throbbing through his flushed face and pounding heart. All was quiet. Inside each man’s head, every thought fled. An honest answer is like a kiss on the lips. Yesh’ua leaned in and tried again, more honestly. Oh, that you were like a brother to me who nursed at my mother's breasts! If I found you outside, I would kiss you, and none would despise me.

        Yesh’ua had copulated with other god creatures, with past and future versions of himself, with the vacuum of space. His relations with all those beings had been mathematical and perfect, the spacetime-bending pleasure and agony leaving black holes in their wake. It was nothing like that with John. Instead of endlessly iterating fractals of trillions of mouths and tongues roiling together in hunger, there were only two. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For thy love is more delightful than wine. Instead of helices of pleasure spiraling forward forever, so far that they looped back to before the Big Bang, there was only the brief 20-30 minutes of clutching and pawing at each other, as if vainly attempting to cheat death, yearning for eternity. Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other. Instead of tentacles lightyears long, intertwining like tendrils, merging at the subatomic level, there were only weak animal bodies hugging each other, as if somehow by squeezing and thrusting they could convince their incompressible bodies to occupy the same volume. His left arm is under my head, and his right arm embraces me.

        They lay panting on the floor of the beached fishing boat. A billion galaxies burned beyond reach above Galilea’s sea. Yesh’ua’s mind and heart buzzed and hummed and burned like the innumerable quasars he had, in another lifetime, snuffed out of existence. “Being with you makes me wish we could live forever,” murmured John. Yesh’ua, sleepy and drifting, simultaneously experiencing the Sun’s supernova billions of years in the future, gazed into John’s nut-brown eyes and was surprised by the hot tears filling his own.

        The Word was in the beginning. All things were made by It; nothing that exists was made without It. In It was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended It not. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

        During the Passover supper of Yesh’ua’s 33rd year, he made an announcement to his disciples, “Whither I go, thou canst not follow me.” Hotheaded Peter was the first to respond. “I will lay down my life for thy sake!” Yesh’ua was too numb to be amused. But all John had to say was “That’s selfish,” before excusing himself and walking briskly from the upper room, unimpressed and agitated.

        That night in Gethsemane, while the other disciples slept, the tempter came to him. “Do you Love me?” asked John.

       “With all my heart, all my soul, all my mind, and all my strength,” insisted Yesh’ua.

       “If I was dying of starvation, would you feed me?” demanded John.

       “I would command that these stones be made bread,” said Yesh’ua.

       “If I stood on the pinnacle of the temple and threw myself down, would you rescue me?” accused John.

        “I would bear you up with my hands like an angel, and you would not even strike your foot against a stone,” Yesh’ua assured.

        “And if we stood on the highest mountain to see the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and I asked you for all of them, would you give them to me?” John’s angry, pleading voice in the still midnight threatened to wake the others.

       “Anything you asked, you would receive,” implored Yesh’ua.

        John took a deep, shaky breath, and in a still, small voice he asked, “If you love me so much, then, why the fuck are you leaving?”

        Yesh’ua closed his eyes for a very long time. “This Love is like living death. You all carry it around like it’s another heart or liver or lung, and you’re all dying.”

       “Everything dies here,” explained the tempter.

       “Everything but me. I won’t carry it anymore. I can’t drink this cup.”

       “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

       “I can’t drink this cup.”

        On Friday, Yesh’ua hung impaled from a wooden cross, ostensibly bound by nails, as ostensibly as gravity had bound him to the surface of the stormy lake when he had strolled out to the disciples’ fishing boat. Salome and Mary Magdalene wailed and clawed at the dirt. John supported the limp and dejected Joseph. The nerve endings in Yesh’ua’s wrists and feet screamed up his spine and into his brain, but the pain could only engulf his bodily vessel. The anguish and abandonment dripping from John’s scowling eyes pierced deeper than mortality, past the event horizon at the center of Yesh’ua’s being and into the numerically indescribable singularity beneath.

        “My god, my god,” whispered John to nobody, “why are you forsaking me?”

        It tasted like death as it slid down her throat and dropped caustically into her stomach. A rapidly inflating panic, a nauseating, superficial sweetness. The consciousness of death, utter vulnerability, and visceral disappointment with her innermost self all blended together with the mealy, gritty, cough-medicine sweet of the fruit. It tasted like rot, though fresh from the Tree. Her tongue would probably carry this forever, she lamented. The approaching footsteps seemed to her an intentional and dramatic addition of insult to injury.

        Later accounts of the incident record God’s first words to Eve as a coy question: “Where are you?” In these depictions, God already knows the answer. His daily stroll through the garden in the cool of the afternoon takes Him purposefully into the height of turmoil His wayward child is experiencing. But in truth, God’s path through the Garden was never predestined. She liked to let her mind wander, even if it meant regularly getting lost in the Garden's denser temperate rainforests or bogged down in the deep snow of its northernmost Tundra. She was always thinking of new additions and renovations, like little pocket dimensions that would really tie the grassland's cave network together. Her first words to Eve after happening upon her that day were: “That's called a Red Delicious.” As Eve furiously sputtered and gagged out bites of the apple, God thought she was just being melodramatic about a new food she didn’t like. “It’s not juicy or sweet like the Honeycrisp,” admitted the Almighty, “but the bonobos like it a lot. I thought you would too.”

        Eve plopped to the ground and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I... I...” Eve’s gut and chest couldn’t decide between vomiting and sobbing uncontrollably.

        “Um. You might like the Granny Smith.”

        “...I’m sorry,” Eve finally squeezed the words out of her lungs.

        God turned to stare at the Tree, then slowly to the apple by Eve’s feet, mostly intact, then to Eve’s trembling frame rocking forward and back.

        “Really, it was that bad?”

        “He said I would die! He said you would throw me out of the Garden, and that I’d be a sinner and suffer forever!” It all came tumbling out.

        “Who told you this?” asked God.

        “The serpent. He talked about ‘Row Botts’ and ‘Otta Mattons’ who can only follow orders, with no will of their own.” Future retellings of the story frame the Forbidden Tree as a test of trust. The Serpent’s role is somewhat abridged, with its dialogue limited to casting doubt on God’s commands (“Did God really say...? Surely you will not die...”). Theologians assert that without such a test, the mother and father of humanity lacked free will, and therefore the ability to truly love the Creator. In fact, it took quite a while for the Serpent to get Eve to understand this. Eve’s newly-formed imagination struggled first to grasp the concept of a creature that unswervingly followed the programming written inside of it, and then to assign the quality of “unloveable” to such a creature.

        “And then he showed me the Tree,” continued Eve. “He said it was Forbidden, and that I had to want to eat the fruit, but then choose to obey you anyway. Otherwise...”--her eyes shut tightly as her mind churned to piece together the syllogism--“...otherwise, how am I supposed to love you if I can't choose you, and how can I choose you if I can't not choose you?” The trust a child holds in her parent’s instinct to love her unconditionally, the trust inherent to her flesh and base nature--it was this trust that made it so hard for Eve to make the mental leaps towards Pure Love (named “Agape Love” by subsequent authors). This is love born of will and right belief and intentional assent, love that is a holy and untarnished idea. It is a love that must be asked into your heart, not a love that is woven into your body and blood.

        Eve looked up into God's eyes. “I just wanted to love you, like really actually love you, not just be a heartless Row Bahtt who doesn't know anything! Robe Aughts don’t love you and you don’t love them! That’s what he said,” sobbed Eve.

        God eased down and sat cross-legged facing Eve. “Those are some very big thoughts and feelings you’re having. How old did I make you again? Sixteen? Seventeen?”

         Eve looked up, puzzled. “Days?”

        “Nevermind. So what happened next?”

        “Well, I looked at the fruit, and then I smelled it, just to give it an honest chance, and then I took a tiny bite, and oh! It was awful and horrid and now I'm going to die!" If she had been old enough to wear makeup, it would have been blotched and smeared all over her face.

        God was silent. A nearby bird warbled a solemn tune, as if something profound and irreversible had happened. It was pretty pretentious for a robin. God leaned forward, placed her hands just above Eve’s elbows, and squeezed. “Do you think before today our love didn’t mean anything?”

        “The Serpent said it didn’t count without something called ‘moral agency.’”

        “Eve,” God said, gently but firmly, “I’m not your lover. I don’t need you to wake up every day and choose me, above all other possible mates. I’m your mother, and you’re my child. Factually and primally, that is our bond. Do you think the mommy elephants worry if their baby elephants actually love them, or if it's just a trick of genetic programming?”

        “I suppose they don’t seem so worried about it... but wait, are you saying that they choose to love each other, or not?” Eve had inadvertently stumbled into the very first philosophical musing on the idea of free will. God struggled not to get bogged down in the weeds. “Well, inasmuch as free will is a construct used to make sense of the innumerable chaotic factors that influence every thought and action you have... and inasmuch as it’s complicated and sort of imaginary... you are kind of a robot. An impulse-filled, messy, not-very-good robot. Possibly the best robot.” Eve smiled.

        “And you said a snake told you all this?” asked God.

        “Yeah, a snake with legs.” It didn’t seem to God that Eve knew what a snake was, and she suspected that Adam’s short attention span might be the cause of the confusion. By the time he made it to naming the reptiles, he may have been playing fast and loose with animal groupings. Still, she made a mental note to revisit her design. Perhaps she had been too generous doling out limbs to all the land animals.

“Well the snake is wrong. You love me just fine,” continued God. “Eve, you are good, deep down and all the way out, always. Social bonding, community building, mirror neurons, empathy, preservation of the weak and sickly, cooperation--I built all these into your instincts. You’re good because you need goodness to survive. And as far as this epoch is concerned, you’re one of my favorite species. I don’t need a theological argument from a reptile to convince me that I love you. Anyways, they’re one of my least theologically-insightful creations.”

        Eve couldn’t help but beam at that. Untwining from her seated fetal position, she closed her eyes and leaned into God’s bosom, letting the snot and tears drip unabashed as their arms found each other’s shoulders and pulled tight.

        “I’m never going to die, right?”

        Eve’s head was nestled under God’s chin, so she couldn’t see God shut her eyes tightly and grimace. “My love, you were always going to die. Someday, hopefully a long, long time from now...” Eve recoiled, as if bitten by a viper. “...when you're old and happy and surrounded by your own kids.”

        Eve’s mouth hung agape, and her lower lip trembled. “How...how could you... why would you let that happen? Are you going to make me leave the Garden, too?” It seemed obvious to later story collectors that this was the explicit bargain for following the rules and staying inside the Garden. Common knowledge held that human suffering had a beginning, and it could not have been baked into the design all along. God would not have used death as the ink with which to write the story of life. Eve was under this assumption too, and God struggled to explain how it could be any other way.

        “As a creature designed to do anything within its power to survive, it doesn’t make any sense to you, I know. But everything has to die sometime.” God sighed and held her hands palms upward apologetically. “I’m not magic, I’m just God.”

         This moment is what later authors would call the Curse. It explained not only how people suffered at the hands of their fellow humans, but also the toil, the hardship, the natural disasters, and the disease-causing microbes. One early Christian apostle declared that all of creation was trapped in “bondage to decay,” and that it “groaned as in the pains of childbirth” waiting for redemption by a savior. If only, they thought, if only Eve had not been so selfish and ungrateful and discontent. If only she had loved God more.

        Other writers surmised that Eve’s choice stemmed from her desire to become like a god. In one version of the story, the Serpent uses this prospect to tempt Eve. But in fact, in that very moment, Eve wanted to be nothing like God. “I would never do this to my kids!” she sobbed. “This is not how I would have set up the world to work. I would never let them die or hurt or get sick or kick them out of Paradise!”

        God pulled the hair tie from the tight bun high on the crown of her head and let her hair spill down to her waist. She combed it out with her fingers, avoiding the daggers Eve was glaring at her. She began to weave a braid. The thick locks lazily twisted and meandered around each other like a North American river that would one day drain into the Gulf of Mexico.

         “‘Kicked out of Paradise.’” She mulled over the phrase. “That is what they’ll say. Generations from now, in sickness, and pain, and heartbreak, and separation, they’ll remember stories of you and say, ‘If only she hadn’t taken a bite of the fruit.’ As if that mattered.”

        The long pause was punctuated only by Eve’s resentful sniffles. “Twelve thousand kilometers from here,” said God, “on a completely different continent, there’s a little sandstone canyon with a creek cutting through it, brimming with elk, bats, cliff swallows, lizards, owls, critters big and small.” She closed her eyes to concentrate on where the previous afternoon’s stroll had taken her. In the winter, it fills with mist, and snow piles up like dust into crags and corners of the giant red rock tombstones. In the summer the sun bakes every stone, but the water stays cool and refreshing, and crawfish flit away backwards from splashing feet. Giant, fallen trees crisscross the cliffs like capricious stairways. With the picture clear in her mind, God continued. “One day, people will call it a holy place. It’s the most mediocre of all my accomplishments on that entire continent. I’ve honestly lost count of how many spots like that I’ve sprinkled all over that region. Compared to my highest mountains, tallest waterfalls, or longest rivers, it’s not that memorable.” And yet a day spent there would bring people to bless the earth itself for the gift of existing. Even people who didn’t believe in God. As if that mattered.

        The braid wrapped over God’s shoulder and pooled into her lap. Its intricate, messy pattern defied the constraints of three dimensions. Having neatly tied off the end and regained her train of thought, God finally met Eve’s gaze. “When you’re hurting, it’s easy to wonder, ‘Am I being punished? Am I just fundamentally bad?’ If you had the perfect, loving parent, and something felt wrong with the world, it would be tempting to assume that the problem was you. But no, Eve, you're the loving parent. You're the one who will sit down with your children when they’re reeling from the cuts and bruises of this Garden. You're the one who will hold them and let their snot and tears smear all over your shoulder.”

        God picked up the Red Delicious and brushed away the flecks of damp dirt clinging to the dark, red skin that was just a little too thick to bite into comfortably. “Eve, you're the one who will love your begotten so fiercely that you would lay down your life for their sake.” She bit into the fruit. The disappointing crunch was barely audible.

        Twelve thousand kilometers away, a thin waterfall trickled into a wide, cool grotto shaded on all sides by ruddy, striated walls streaked with black patina. “There’s no ‘kicked out’ of this Garden I gave you. It’s the whole world, my love.”

POSTSCRIPT

        They say that good writing should show, not tell. But I know the limits of my talent, and this story carries too much history and baggage, and burying the context in the plot seems too overwhelming. So here are all the footnotes.

         I thought a lot about the story of Adam and Eve growing up. It was presented to me as a literal event, and my homeschooling science textbooks would shoehorn a defense of Biblical literalism into every chapter. Eve’s transgression was like Pandora’s box, ushering into existence every form of pain and suffering, all from a moment of weakness and/or curiosity and undoubtedly ignorance of the consequences.

        My mom used to say, “If Eve hadn’t eaten the apple, it probably would’ve been me who messed it up anyways.” She liked to describe herself as one of the “shipwrecked” (a term she borrowed from popular Christian author Max Lucado) that God had rescued. I acknowledge that many faith systems cultivate humility and surrender, and they embrace human frailty as a way to draw strength from the divine. But what I observed in my community and family, especially the circle we knew through a Bible-based 12-Step program, carried a strong undercurrent of self-loathing.

        God loved and accepted us, but not because of who we were at our very core, but despite who we were. In fact, our very essence was by default unable to stand in God’s presence because of His fierce, burning justice towards sin. Our mistakes, selfishness, cruelties, but also our fears, our idolatrous attachments, our bodily urges, our shortsightedness—anything short of utter perfection was proof that in the depths of the nucleus of the core of our hearts, we had willfully rejected God and His love. And this choice formed the foundation of our existence from the moment we were born.

        My heart was wicked and deceitful, not to be trusted. My flesh and spirit were pitted in dire opposition to each other in Platonic fashion. One was a dying vessel full of destructive hungers and lusts, and the other was trapped temporarily inside this vessel until the day of its rescue at death. Our passions and interests had to be carefully examined to make sure they did not exceed our love for God, as creatures wont to idolize trinkets above true treasure.

        If my mom read my description of this worldview today, she would find it unfair. She would describe her relationship with God as full of grace, acceptance, and serenity. Perhaps this is true. I only have my outside observations and projections based on the way I lived out Christianity. Then this short story depicting the world’s first mother making the world’s first conscious moral choice is based mostly on me, and what I wish God could have been for me when I sinned. But it’s also a little bit about the woman who thinks herself just as capable as Eve was of ruining immortality and paradise for the entire human race.

        Lazara gasped, a woman alive, awoken having found God, or maybe God had found her.

Now, she would help God found Herself here.

        “Look how dead his eyes look!” Mary of Bethany had screamed to her sister. 

        “The skin slips from his face!” Martha had shouted.

        None of this deterred Lazara. They could call her gaze blank and her visage blue and her hands corpulent. Still, she could see; still, she could be seen; still, she could speak. Yet, this party of men and women, once jovial at her resurrective impossibility, grew solemn when they saw her newfound difference. Their eyes betrayed them. They would still winge, and cry out, and beat their chests in lamentation. They had seen her, and they saw her as a thing dead. But she would show them. She couldn’t make them believers. But she could show the belief of a woman, newfound, alive.

        “It was a miracle,” she would tell them, funeral ashes smeared across her lids. 

        “We have asked too much, bringing you here,” Martha admonished. “Where is 

       our

brother?”

        “He remains in his cave. I walked out instead.”

        Lazara would learn, soon, to dry her tongue–to imagine what they saw instead of her.

—

        When the emperor called upon her–the Emperor!– Lazara garbed herself in her least sweat-sticky robes. Her grief had folded into many things: fear; dejection; a hope of evangelizing away her inconvenience. After all, Augustus’s famous protections were bronzed into his memorial visages: family man; pimp-killer; Champion of Upstanding Women.

        Bronze is a brittle metal.

        “Look how dead her eyes look!” Augustus screeched out in plural mouths. “Her skin!” They harmonized.

        Had she twisted her features wrong? She thought this was how good Roman women prostrated themselves before the Emperor.

        “Tell me what you are!” Augustus’s voices recoiled in unison. “I am Lazara, Once Another. Please; God

        protects me.”

        Augustus’s throats, well-rehearsed, howled a cacophonous Sophoclean Chorus. “Athenian boys will be

        in danger.”

        “I heard him say cunt once.”

        “It did not curtsey to the Emperor, it bowed.”

        “His thigh brushed against me as I left a taxi!”

        Lazara watched her eyes be pulled from her skull, with a hairpin, to kill the Oedipal impulses the Augustinian voices screamed of within her. First, she saw the pins; then, before her optic nerves ripped away from her, she watched her own gasping mouth.

—

        Lazara wandered through a darkness that had once looked like the boiling sun.

Sightlessly, she turned towards the sand. She thought: 

       God could take root here.

        “The skin slips from his face!” a passerby smoking by the pub said. “Look how dead his eyes look!”

        The bystander’s companion grimaced. “Indeed.”

        Lazara faced toward: nothing. Once risen, twice doomed. Her eyes had been stolen like mulberries by a grackle. Blasphemy had become harder to picture. She readied her futile response. “I have seen God,” glistened from her dried tongue. “She saved me. She will be replanted into these dried lands. I have seen her,” Lazara’s puffed tongue rasped.

        “You couldn’t have,” the first man laughed.

        The bystander coughed into his hand, and added, “After all, you don’t have eyes.”