Eden: Biblical Fiction of the World's First Family (The Fall of Man Book 1) by Brennan McPherson

Author:Brennan McPherson [McPherson, Brennan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McPherson Publishing
Published: 2020-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

I scoured the land. Not a seed in sight.

I walked until my feet ached. The sun hung precarious, burning like a great eye peeking over the edge of the world. My pulse quickened. I didn’t want to return to Eve with nothing to offer.

I also didn’t want to risk hunger once again setting off her madness.

Yet I had nothing to offer but the very thing she’d asked for. The flesh of a beast.

I looked at the shimmering, jagged form of my obsidian axe. The only time I had used a weapon to harm another creature was when defending myself from the monkeys that stole our grain. If I could do it then, I could do it now. Desperation had been my ally in that moment, and I had not regretted my actions.

But this was different. The sun set as I approached the sheep huddled for warmth in the cleft of a stony outcropping that left their dark forms hard to differentiate.

I applied Eve’s reasoning and agreed that if I did not bring one of these beasts to Eve as food, we would likely suffer death through starvation.

But that was the problem, it was still so unsure.

Eve disbelieved that Father would rescue us. I was not convinced.

“Then why hasn’t he yet?” she would say.

“Because he is testing us,” I replied out loud, and several sheep raised their heads.

“When shall we pass? When we perish?”

“No,” I said. “We shall pass when . . .”

I did not know. And that terrified me. Already, the weakness of hunger had settled on me like a stone covering. I did not know whether I had the strength to drag a dead beast home. Especially as the dark around me deepened.

Yet it was all I could do.

I raised my hatchet, pulled one of the sheep from its herd, and slayed it as quickly as I could.

It took three blows, and with the sound of each strike, my bones become more brittle.

I stood over the beast’s motionless form and felt that the violence had displaced my soul. As though my eyes were windows far off, and my limbs not mine but another’s.

The wind blew clouds away from the moon, and as the light grew, I noticed for the first time the color of the sheep’s fur.

Black.

Tears came to my eyes. It seems now unreasonable, or juvenile, but I felt in that moment that the dark sheep symbolized my unborn child. That my axe had fallen thrice not to gain food, but to devour my own flesh and blood. Not that the sheep was actually my child, but that my mistake of murdering that innocent beast would somehow bear the terrible consequence my nightmare hinted at.

“Father,” I moaned. “Why did you never give us the right to eat another living beast?”

There was no answer.

Yet now that it was dead, could I let my mistake be in vain?

I dragged it home, fingers aching with the weight of its heft. Fur tearing loose as I tugged it over rocks.

I let the body drop outside our home.

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