Protoevangelium
by Allister Nelson
She was like an ink stain of rot, blotted out by God after too many beers. I saw Eve through the hazy night — long brown hair, clear gray eyes, golden-brown skin, curves that would drive poets to ecstasy. But there was something off, something cursed, at her core. A bad apple seed, left to waste away in the Garden.
And oh, how I loved my maggots and worms.
“What are you doing, First Daughter?” I asked, serpent-formed, as I glided across her smooth ankles.
“Picking apples, Sam.”
They fell dead and decayed in her accursed hands.
“It seems, my dear, that you are killing them.”
She lifted me to her breast, allowing me to tangle across her limbs in thick black coils.
“Am I not Death since I ate your Fruit, dear Nachash? Or was that a metaphor? Where once I brought Life, I now birth Death. And oh, my impossible son Cain is gone, and he was never his brother’s keeper.”
“What are you doing in this ragged Garden of Demons, Eve?” I hissed gently, sensing her sweet honey’d core as I licked her legs. “It’s not comfort I planted in this garden. It’s rage. My rage at God, growing curling, from the soil, up to the blackened sun of blasted bastard Father.”
Eve sighed, tracing my lazy scales idly. “I am making fertilizer for Abel’s grave. Did you know Adam left, after the latest stillborn?” There was flint in her stormy eyes, accusatory, towards me, regret at her husband… or the Universe? It was hard to tell. “I too can bear nothing but dead fruit Samael, like you and your Tree.”
“So, who cares? I like you solely for your black heart of rebellion and truth-finding, Eve. Those who gamble mortal fate against Tricksters are of my own flock. You were the first to pursue that path, might I add.”
“I am no Lamb, Samael.”
She lifted my viper form from her arms and threaded my thick coils around her like a comforting string of jewels, my iridescent onyx scales melding with my ruby mouth, crimson eyes, and pearlescent fangs. I shone like crown gems on a bloody love goddess borne of wrath and death.
“And I am no Snake.”
“So you claim! But you favor the form.”
“Crawling on my dirt without my legs makes me humble, Father supposed. He stripped me of my dear lizard feet, so a’slithering on the dirt I go.”
“Well, fuck our Father.”
“Naughty words, Eve.”
She sat down in my barren garden of Baruch, with winding rotten grapes on my vineyard bone posts, our apples and pomegranate, a long broken road to our exile we had walked together, and sighed, mixing the rotted fruit into a mash with the wormy apples she had gathered.
I assumed my angelic form, mostly untouched since the Fall – only now, my eyes burned red, not blue, and my golden skin had paled white as the lily, fangs and claws and talons disrupting my Lightbearer beauty. And half my side, from head to toe, was stripped of the bone of the Grim Reaper, lacerated of flesh, muscle, and sinew. Now, I was Shadow. Rot, Death, Ruin.
Pale Horseman, God’s “Left Hand” for jerking off, perhaps, or sending a fuck you to humanity, God’s red hand and sinner who labored as slave and rebel in the same accursed breath – Samael.
“I am good at making truth from Death, Samael. That is the cursed gift you gave me. I, who only bear dead wee bairns, and who is a constant disappointment to my Lord and to my Husband, have failed at womanhood. I failed as the Mother of Cain and Abel. I cannot satisfy Adam as much as I try — he only dreams, bitter-chested, of your wife Lilith’s tricks, touches, and kisses — and it seems the only one who ever bothers to visit me here in the ruins of the Tigris and Euphrates, in this land beyond time, is you. My Damnation and personal Satan, Adversary of all life I try to bring into this world. You come to toy with me and test my temper, it seems out of your own immortal boredom, and I agree to be your experiment as we babble on about things we have no business speaking of. But, finding each other entertaining, Samael, you and your Eve dance like fools and continue to gossip like old hags. Why do we stick like glue, I wonder.”
I pulled a cigarette from my cassock pocket. Eve was in a cream linen summer dress with glass ruby beads shaped like a pomegranate and black opalescent thread stitching. She had invented sewing, weaving, beading, – long before man needed to don sackcloth and ash and hide in the desert from God.
Eve had been brilliant since the beginning. Tamed vegetable fiber and sheep hair into cloth, rope, and linen. Spun on her distaff and acted as diviner and wonder-maker, peering at her skeins into the future, and plucking them apart to cast spells. It marveled me, and Samyaza and Azazel had learned tinctures, beauty, medicine, spells, and weapons from her. That was another reason Adam had strayed – he hated the eager, hateful yet jealous angels and demons that thronged round Eve’s burning heart: half-molten from me, half-fire from God. She was a terpsichore that leapt from his earthen side, stealing all Adam’s genius and beauty, and leaving him one rib lost.
He had been faithful to her, as much as Man can be, when Lilith is involved. Taken in Temptation. But bitter tides had crossed over the millennia, in this land beyond time, where even the Hol Bird does not fly, Gog and Magog do not water, and the Leviathan dare not swim.
“Why did you offer it to me, Samael?”
“Hmm, well, why… why indeed. I’d say I pity you, but I do not. Your curiosity is all your own, Eveling. I was only too happy to have an ally against my Father when I offered you the Fruit of Knowledge. For Father deems everyone subordinate to him. I gave immortal souls to humans, did I not? A spark of Samael’s Promethean fire in each of your children —
“All dead save Cain, who is your own son.”
I narrowed my eyes, tracing her rounded stomach. Pregnant again. “There will be more.”
“Gods damn me. I have not lain with Adam in years. Only you.”
“Where his seed fails, Nephil brats stick. This is my heir. La-Azazel. Called Az —strength. They will scapegoat him, someday. You, who crush my head? Our seeds will mingle forever, my friend Eve, when Adam is tired and gives up his scythe, and Lilith strays like her mistress the Shekinah into the arms of our Father God, and the Shekinah wanders in exile, stranded and searching a way to gather her crying Elohim sons and daughters back to her burning breast.”
“We do always seem to be everyone’s last pick, old friend,” Eve laughed a bit. I warmed at her smile.
“And for good reason, my Eve. When you and I are probers of every sensation – inventors of agriculture, tools, music — who is to say Samael and Eve did not create humanity? Isn’t this whole bloody Earth a mess of your one pivotal choice? Would you rather be Father’s Sheep?”
Eve smiled a hair fracture length, happy with the fertilizer, and brushed my hand from her pregnant belly.
“All because I took a bite. What will become of us, my friend and first teacher, Lucifer?”
I flinched at my unfallen name, tears welling in my eyes.
I thought back. My lips on Michael’s as he shoved his sword ‘Quis-et-Deus?’ style through my heart, like some broken crusader. Him, pumping hate inside me – casting me from his bed into Hell.
Finding comfort in Eve when Lilith was much more an enjoyer of mortal women and her sister wives, when the rule of Gehenna became too much and Beelzebub blamed me for the latest soul tax kerfuffle or Goetic Lord Rebellion.
Eve was a comfort when the world was dark. And to her, I was the same.
“I think we get to choose our future, Eve: free of our partners, free of God, free of even the Apocalypse. That’s the beauty of choice: a failsafe happy ending. Souls may change — you and I may wither physically, but when you bit my lips, took my zuhama into your hungry hips – you broke the barrier separating seraph from Sapiens. Now, oh? I see a world populated by the Daughters and Sons of Samael and Eve. Adam, perhaps, if he ever recovers his bruised ego at you stealing all his grace and fortune, and Lilith, mayhaps, if she ever returns to my charms.”
I lifted Eve into my wings, kissed her. She moaned, folded against me.
“Let’s make a garden, Samael. One that is just ours, where petunias and roses can bloom.”
She stood, reaching out one hand to me, the other to her compost. We walked out of Da’ath, out of Death, and into the period at the end of the sentence.
Off the page, into Life.
“I’d like that, Eve. We can sow our own ending, one where a girl is curious, and she lusts after a Star. And what they have between them…”
“Is Good.”
Eve kissed me with the old friendship of the Protoevangelium, reinterpreted favorably where no serpents were crushed, simply men’s passions enflamed upon women and demons, and together, far from Nod and Eden, we found freedom.
And if you are reading this, dear Child of Eve?
You can blame me for your bad side,
for my poison flows
in your veins.