After Abel and Other Stories Read Free

give, the goats run away, but when I labored to give birth to Abel I bled so badly God Himself hadto step in. That was my first witnessed miracle. If He hadn’t saved me, there’d be no more humans. No one around to feed the two babies I’d already birthed, either. No one to replace that one with this new one.
    Finally I’ve figured out how to put them to my breast. It’s only now, with Seth, that I’ve learned how to lift him without the bruising or swellings that hardened under my skin in the months after Cain and Abel were born. He bumps his head against me, mouth open and searching. He lays his hand against my skin as he suckles, smiles up at me, his mouth stretched around my nipple, sighs in pleasure. But it took losing Abel to learn it, and here’s me with no girls to teach it to. Just these boys, full of jealousy, and murderous. One dead, the other gone. Where to, I have no idea. We found the body in a field, his head bashed in, face and neck covered in blood already turning to brown, and his brother disappeared. I lost two in one moment, and I felt a gash open in my stomach at the sight of that boy, whom I had brought into the world at the cost, almost, of my own life.
    Who was there to teach me what a mother feels when she loses a son? Not God. He’d retreated somewhere beyond our vision. Not Adam, who clasped his hands together, looked down at the ground, and then spent the night with his back turned to me.
    When we first found him, I thought he would get back up, his skull would undent, and we four would goback to how we’d been, growing and tending to the land and animals. I think now that Adam understood at once, but it took me longer to recognize or admit to that fly-covered finality.
    It’s not that I hadn’t seen death. Animals died around us all the time. Mauled, torn apart by predators. Some fell sick or got old and curled up under bushes to depart in peace. One bad winter, we lost almost all the lambs. Adam took those deaths so personally at first, each a brief disappointment. Maybe it hardened him, crushed his first impulse to label, to name each creature as it came before him. Which is why it was left to me to find the right names for my sons.
    I didn’t make the connection between that body lying twisted on the ground and our own brief lives. I thought people lived by a different set of rules. God spoke to us, after all, even if less and less often as time wore on. Surely that made us special. Surely that meant we’d live forever. Scraped, bruised, broken, yes, but we lived. Adam never lost his limp after a fall off a rock shelf on our travels east out of the Garden, but it didn’t kill him. It barely slowed him down. That very night he mounted me with an intensity I had never seen in him before. Not a year passed, and I got rounder and rounder, with rumblings under my heart and God mum on what was happening or why.
    There too, I had the lesson of the animals to thank,how they also got fat and then lay down to push out their young. So I watched and learned. And Cain was an easy birth, slipped out of me like a gift. Now, two hard births later, I know what a mercy that was, how God took pity on me. Or maybe He just fooled me, wanted to show me how carefully I should have attended to His words. At the time, though, I thought—but didn’t say, I never said it out loud—that God must have been trying to scare me with His talk of difficult childbirth.
    That first time, a little panting, some cramps, and then him, slick and covered in white, his face puffy, but his form a perfect replica of his father’s. It seemed a wondrous connection—the beauty of Adam’s body making this new thing with me. I was fooled by it, fooled into wanting more, my desire growing stronger as the weeks and then months passed. It was just as God had promised, though I didn’t pay close enough attention. My desire was for my husband. I was so young, my