Eve discovers the murder of Abel

She sees the boy in the field among the furrows his brother has made. It is cold, the furrows fresh for planting. The boy is facedown, still, and she goes to him quiet because she does not want to disturb his prayer. 

Face to earth, arms thrown wild across it as though to receive the godmade soil into his godmade self. It is a beautiful gesture. She thinks she has never seen a gesture like it. Not in all the years in the glade or since. A posture of total submission.

She stays at a distance along the fieldedge and sits where feral grain comes up among the scrub with its attendant thorns and small, bright flowers. There she beholds the boy, her boy lately become a man, her boy in his stillness. His broad shoulders show through the hairwork of his tunic, his bare arms furred and fibrous from work, hands bent into the soil his brother has tilled as though to take hold of it. 

The ground beneath her is cold, and she pulls the bear rug closer around her shoulders. The boy’s neck is turned away from her, and his thick dark hair is matted from sleep and sweat and his beautiful carelessness. 

He is still, and she is still, and the cold settles down from the sky and up from the soil, and he is too still too long, and she holds the bear rug close against her, watches now for his breath to lift the strong shelf of his shoulder, but she does not see it, and something settles into her that she has not known and cannot name. 

It is a pressure in her bowels and a stone in her chest, and she hears her own voice hollowing up from within and singing out on breath. She cannot move for a long time. A steady wind comes up across the field and lifts the loose soil so it dances in the sidelong dusking light and whispers the scrub against itself, and after a long time, she finds she can will her body again, so she rises and goes to him.

The boy’s eyes are open, but wrong. His mouth is open and filled with tilled soil, and there is no breath in it. The shape of his face is wrong, the turn of his neck unnatural, the color of his skin, and the soil beneath him going to mud though it has not rained in a week. She does not understand what she is seeing, does not have a word for this.

The dusklight braces the field, and the wind rises carrying tilled soil, soil her other boy has tilled, and this soil rises into the shockwhite light and breathes across the two of them there at the fieldedge among scrub and feral grain, thorns and small, bright flowers. The soil covers them like a second skin, like a new body, as she lies down beside the boy and lets the soil settle over her, takes it into her mouth as though to take the godmade soil into her godmade self, and in her mouth it is sweet and loam, and she releases her voice into the soil and sings.

The sound fills her throat and her bowels and her womb and shakes loose a knowledge that had lain quiet and deep, germinant until that moment, and she knows that what is breaking open in her will be the inheritance of all her daughters, and the soil blows across the two of them, burning with cold light.