What if Cain had been aborted?

 

The question is not whether life begins at conception like pro-lifers profess, or at first breath like the bible says. Life began billions of years in the past and hasn’t stopped since. Or maybe just six thousand years back when Eve got her man tripping on drugs, he snacked on an apple, but it screamed out loud, “I am a living being. You’ve hurt me, you’ve sinned.” His girl wasn’t happy, she had a bad trip, so Adam came up with a plan to handle this. He told the apple “you might be alive but you’re no human being, I can draw that line wherever I want it to be.”

He came down from the drugs but his mind was made up. Adam began changing things into whatever he named them. The garden was gone, but now he had a kingdom. The plants became crops, the beasts were livestock. And they didn’t scream anymore, they just squealed. They weren’t friends anymore, they were meals. It’s not a sin anymore, but necessary evil. How else could his girl feast on some baby back ribs?

Before long it dawned on Adam that even people with different skin were not as human as him, so he started to draw lines on them and by the tenth day of genesis, Eve vomited from morning sickness. She was having a baby back then even though she didn’t want kids. Not this one. It might be alive but it’s not human, she cried, not yet. Adam wouldn’t listen. The next line was not drawn where she asked him. He said, “If anyone here isn’t human it’s you, bitch. That’s my son.” So he saved baby Cain but the cost still came from the life Abel lost.

Later, God sent her one begotten, transgender son to correct this original sin by reminding men that what you do to the least, you do to Him. He’s the food you eat, the slave you beat, He’s the life striving to enter this world through any possible portal. He’s even the man with the rifle aimed at your temple to remind you who’s really immortal. A human being is still meat, and she’ll eat you. Sometimes they win and sometimes, it’s your turn to sin. Those are the options. Shoot your shot, cast your stone if you have no victim. It’s not your fault your mom’s twat tore to pieces on your way out but she still had to forgive you. God’s job assignment isn’t innocence. God gave you power over one thing, your actions. Nobody controls their own results. All you have is your best. Haters only mean to ignore themselves. So wear a condom if you're anti-abortion. And yes, let the lepers back in, but only after you've cured them.

His followers listened, then when their savior’s speech finished, they stapled him to a cross, paid for popcorn and watched him rot. He wasn’t human either, just a failed god. They weren’t looking for justice, just somebody to judge and they caught Him sitting on their throne.

Unconditional

Full disclosure, this is not some rain-soaked love poem penned by the frozen fingers of some civil war veteran in 1867, letter carried by postman on horseback seven hundred miles in the snow so his lover would read it and know just how much the photo of her sun-soaked smile folded in his wallet propels him forward one foot in front of the other through every mud-covered mile of this blood-soaked death patrol. How she sparks hope like fire from a gas leak in a rainstorm. 

This is not that poem, I've already told you exactly how high I built your pedestal, how rosy red you turn the lens I see the world through, but you were allergic to that flowery bullshit so we put on our garden gloves and pulled those weeds out. We worked through it. Our friendship is a big slab of concrete that snaps every pickaxe I slap against it. I wanted to crack it open and find the gold they wrote about in those old love poems. But I found something better, the most valuable matter ever whispered about in the haunted taverns' gossip circles of long dead treasure hunters. I would trade no other brand of union for this slab of concrete friendship, I am so thankful for what we have. 

But it's like this blanket of moss keeps growing on top of it. Not much, I can always scrape it off later, it's just a thin little layer. I stapled on it a reminder not to water it with overthinking or expectations. It doesn't change what we are, it just adds some flavor. I love you as a friend, and also more than that. 

And maybe that's just a challenge to the way society attempts to make us limit and compartmentalize the types of affection we can have for each other so that we can only feel one type of love for our friends, and another for our family, for lovers, for teachers, for monarchs. But you are so many things to me all at once. You're a role model and a fairy god-mother and my queen. Serving you is my favorite thing, my greatest pleasure, it illuminates every node on the spectrum of my emotions and compels every kernel of my being. And still, you're more.

You're a healing light, helping me pull from the shadows of my psyche every wounded piece and hold it tight. You don't just make me feel safe, my love for you is a place where my soul can take refuge. You heal the pain from every bad thing that ever happened to me by the simple fact that it all led me to you. And still, you're more.

You teach me nothing short of unconditional love, not just for you, but for myself, because if I can love you despite the fact that you don't feel exactly the way I wish you did, then I can also love myself despite not being exactly what I wish I were. And as I learn to accept our relationship for what it is, rather than comparing it, I also learn to accept myself as I am. 

I don't think you're my soulmate, I think you're just so spectacular that I don't need one. I get everything I want just from wanting. I don't love you for what you mean to me, what you could give me, what you represent, no. I love you because you are so undeniably lovable. I used to think it was a bad thing I couldn't turn off these feelings. Try as I might, the pining of my heart will never stop. But I'm starting to see the benefit of feeling such solid consistency. It's not a place where I hold out for hope that one day you'll realize you love me just as much. I'm not that kind of masochist. By contrast, I love myself so much that I don't need to dole out my love only in places where it will be neatly reciprocated in exactly the same flavor and shape. Any pain I feel is a reminder to weed out those expectations.  My self-worth does not depend on you, rather I love you because I'm worth too much and I worked too hard not to enjoy happiness in whatever form it chooses to arrive. It is not hope for more that keeps my next foot in front of the other on this brief, exhausting, chaotic journey. It's not a journey at all when I think of you. There's no where else I need to go. My love is a dance floor.

To climb

Your walls, so tall
Stretched high above the fog
My eyes squint tight
I hold my knots
My nose leaks snot
Still I can't spot the top
I know it not
If this gold I want
This goal I sought
Is real
Still it's worth it just to fail
Even if each pull and tug and heave
Each cold breath of air I wheeze
is futile
A voyage to a door that's closed and locked
Still it's worth it just to knock
To climb, to try
To test my self against that open sky
To grasp for love, to close my eyes
And dream of reaching your last block
To crack your walls
And vanquish them
Replace them as your safe haven
And maybe such a dream could never happen
Still it's worth it just to fall
And let my body decorate the bottom
A tribute to my passion
So others could see something great awaits
On the other side

Like television

The first time I found Jesus he was strung up on a fence post, his arms stretched out and stapled to the rails, belly stuffed full of straw, a scare crow god there to scare off death, monsters, outlaws and the unknown, my rubber turkey deity on a cross to comfort me with the promise that I could take that casket doorway to his place with the other zombies, I just have to be a good person, which is simple because right and wrong is simple. Just do what it says in the book besides this part. Don't overthink it. Just watch television. It'll teach you how the world works, there may be some growing pains when you actually experience it. But I have no regrets.

I promise you mother. I'm so sorry I ran away. I just couldn't live without reminders that you love me. I thought about what mothers did on television, the way they loved their kids, I saw my friends with mothers who would talk to them, and suddenly I wish I knew about my grandparents. All I remember about them is that I grew up going to funerals. On my birthday I always wore the same exact Peter Pan outfit and then lay awake at night wondering if it was really true that one day we all grew old and died.

The second time I found Jesus, she was staring back at me through my captive reflection painted on the iridescent gasoline sheen from a glossy silver 30-gram brick of cannabis hash oil bought from a man in a tinfoil hat to wax the bored look off my face. Lubed up to ride forty days and nights on a desert highway performing the gas-jug asphalt American ceremony of anointed gutter-punk garbage messiah kings raging for a different kind of machine. And as I peaked I noticed not one set of blotter prints behind me but two.

I knew I was different. I can't sit still. I must discover, create, explore, make an impact on this world not to find meaning but to hide myself from the lack of it. I keep trying to hide from mortality by making my life as rich and full of love as possible but it all goes to the same place. Behind me. Each breath in and out of my lungs is its own last one but knowing that fact doesn't help me repeat them. I can't even remember my dreams, how am I supposed to remember this life, this place, all of you, when it's over? I try to keep moving forward but I'm still just out-stretched and holding on to the rails. I still wish things were different. I still need to forgive someone. I still need to apologize for failing to save the world, I could have done something, I was different. I still need to apologize to my mother.

I'm so sorry I forgot my temper. Nerves dripped discomfort, my skin went goosebumps and burnt hot by embers, mouth scowling warning growls. I can't sit still. I bit and snapped until control came back but by then I was bitten and leaking puddles of regret and wondering how could I say that to my mother? I didn't mean to. But the fact is every interaction orbits the weather, or what somebody said the other day. I talk about my dreams and you talk about acting classes. And I realize then that we are from far-away planets. I never feel connected. It's like you're never present, and there's always this tension. I can't go without reminders that I'm held and loved, so I'll settle for forgiveness. I'll set to prove you love me one way or another. I'll force you to choose from the worst side of me and nothing.

The third time I found Jesus, he was strung-out on a cross-fade of drugs, arms stretched out to embrace his dog as he delivered his sermon to the condemned office building giving him shelter while the rain poured buckets. Wrapped in a coincidence blanket, magic crystals hanging from his neck, gnostic symbols tattooed to his face. In his mouth, a cigarette he had pulled off the ground, and he offered me a drag. He called it sacred tobacco to exorcise my demons.

He said the secret was to smile. People like smiles. He said I had two lions, their names good and evil, problem and opportunity, complaint and compliment. Their names are shame and gratefulness, faith and fearfulness, Scar and Mufasa, stories and memories about me that live on in others after I die, and I chose which. But he wasn't finished. He told me the worst side of you is not that evil-looking scar you hide from the world in shame and fear, it's the coward that hides it. Forget dying, that's how you are annihilated. I'm so sorry, my mother, that I never listened. Please tell me about my grandparents. It doesn't have to be like television.

Cage

I have to love you through a cage. You are my great white shark. You're beautiful. You're powerful and brave and hard, so hard to love, my shark, so full of teeth and I believed I could dive beneath that water and swim but I'm losing my limbs. My excuses vamoosing to be this stupid. I have to choose different. I have to love you through a cage. My great black bear, your teeth gleam through a glare. They are teeth that could tear off my skin but I see you wearing a grin. I see it shine like the curve of the moon.. And your laugh and your hugs. I love it so much when your arms wrap round my gut. So soft I forgot that those arms come with claws primed to pounce and to maul me if I move too suddenly, and I don't want to run but I'm maxed out on regret for the time I spent playing dead to avoid that claw's edge. Cutting off pieces of me and feeding you them so you would not starve and now I'm something less than I was at the start but even if I'm limping, at least I'm walking. Whatever I have to sacrifice, no matter how hard, I’ll begin a new act in my life, whether written in ink or in spit, I made a promise that I would survive this. And you growl at me, you cry and you plead, asking why all these boundaries through tears in your eyes and I have to hide all the blood that I leak and trick you to think that my heart's not broken so that I can start over. I show you a cold front so maybe you'll give up. I can't be weak to a lion, I must scream. I have to love you through my rage. I have to curl my lips up, my pearl white fangs flexed out. My cactus arms stretched out as if to beckon a hug, but covered in needles and you held me despite them. And you left blood on my quills to write with. And you claim to have wasted the time spent but it’s our life and our time can never be worthless and now I need you to survive this. Love me like a page in your life and turn it.

A story for Jay Hulme

Dusk turned to twilight as the city burned. Nothing could be done. Despite my best efforts, every dark word of the old woman's prophecy had come to pass. The blue star had fallen. The rain had turned to fire. The day had turned to night. The white king had risen, and created his army. Every marker had come to pass. Every riddle she spoke was answered, the knots of fate relentless. Fate could not be escaped. And fate said very clearly that no man could defeat him.

No man could defeat him, she said. The line echoed back and forth in my mind as I lay beneath the remains of my gollum to shelter myself from the falling embers and flaming arrows that rained overhead. Was there another line? Maybe a key to what could defeat him, if not a man? These thoughts were all I could do to numb myself from the sounds of the common folk being slaughtered, and the wound bleeding from my chest. My eyes ran over the corpse of the chimera I hired, her expression still caught in the surprise she felt when the White King cut her in half. I was surprised, too. My entire unit was destroyed in seconds. It was like nothing at all, and then so much death all at once. And the worst part, he fucking spared me. I took a wound to the chest in the scuffle, but when it came to landing the finishing blow, he hesitated, looked closer, and then let out a thundering, victorious laugh. For he knew the prophecy, too. He knew there was no one else left to stop him now. It was just me, and I was just a man. He left me to bleed out and went on to claim victory and sit the throne.

And I tried to do just that, give up, bleed out. I almost did, too. But I could see the palace doors in the distance. They were opened, taunting me, and the arrogant bastard didn't even place a guard in front. I could just walk in and show him who can't be defeated by any man. But I shuttered at the thought. What could I do? The prophecy was prophecy. Charging him alone would just be a suicide mission. Still, I couldn't get that laugh out of my head. I felt so humiliated. And it's not like I had any where to retreat to. If everything was futile, I may as well stare doom in the face, right? The more I thought about it, and the longer I listened to the screams of the city folk, the more clearly I knew what I had to do. The prophecy may have been written, but the songs had not, and I wanted them to say I tried. So I rose to my feet, now flooded with newfound bravery, powered by conviction, desperation, and humiliation. Steps began to come, one in front of another, as something in me moved. Not deliberately, not like I desired to be there. But like I was compelled by some unseen current. Compelled by the lack of other options, by a conviction greater than self-preservation. I passed through the door. 

"Hey!" turns out there was a guard, maybe several. It was all a haze at that point. I don't even remember reaching for my blade, but by the time I reached the royal chamber, it was dripping blood.

"You," the white king breathed a sigh of relief when I entered the chamber, as if he thought something else was killing his guards. "You should have run for the hills," he chuckled. "You should have hidden in caves and waited and eon or two, for my reign to end."

"Your reign ends today," I stepped closer. He lashed out, launching me back with the pulse he emitted from the swipe of his palm. I slammed against the stone walls of the palace and felt my hair-tie come undone, my long black hair unfurling on either side like raven's wings as I kicked myself from the wall and stormed forward with a twirling slash. He buckled with the blow but when I came for another strike, he grabbed my sword with a bare hand and squeezed, indenting his grip into the blade and bending the edge. He attempted to pull me in but I let go of my sword. As I leapt back, he reached for my arm, ripping at my bracelet and sending the beads flying. I pulled out my long knife, then tore back into him with one slash and another. He took a cut to the arm from the first, but on my second swing, he blocked my arm and grabbed me. This time, I couldn't get away. He proceeded to slam me against his throne with a grunt. I noticed a trickle of blood from his arm. Did I just make him bleed? He cocked his arm back for a punch, but I kicked him back, then I jumped over the throne and began looking for a weapon. Blood bubbled up my throat pooled around my lips, mixing with my lipstick.

"Don't you get it?!" He snapped my sword in half out of frustration and chucked the pieces at me. "No man can defeat me! Give up and die already!"

"That's the funny thing," I answered. "I always wondered about who I was, why I always wanted to be more than just a man." I picked up my broken sword and began to circle him.

"Oh please," he laughed menacingly. "You think you're not still just a man because you don't dress like them? Don't kid yourself. Deep down you know the truth."

"You're right," I responded, circling closer with every strafe. "I've always known the truth, deep down. I just let people like you convince me otherwise."

The white king growled, unleashing a pulse of energy that crumbled the wall behind me. My hair flailed, but this time I took it in stride. I looked at the demolished wall behind me with perplexity as the palace began to creak and cave. His eyes widened. I stepped closer.

"No!" He shrieked. "It can't be! You're a man!" I took another step closer, and his anger turned to fear. He began to plea. "Please. Half my kingdom, please. I will give you half, please. Sir, be reasonable. Sir.”

“It's ma'am,” I corrected, sinking the blade into his heart.

Don't Call Me Brave

Don't call me brave, I wish I were but I wasn't. I didn't charge this field to the crack of a trumpet with faith in the divine truth of my cause, I flunked life, I sunk this ship. I lived out my death wish until I had jack shit to lose and then I transitioned. I flipped out and ripped down this round world my thumb out to peel back the curtains and unseal my sunlight but I was still encased glass. I was see-through and hollow; a monotone robot unable to emote all of these feelings stuck underneath me and nobody was me. I couldn't express me. Not a hat, not a goatee, not a travelling poet fucking with locals and living off magic tricks. I still felt broken. Like a door in my house sits inviting me to my own unexplored territory. The one thing I had left was everything I wasn't allowed to be in this binary world. So I became her.

I'm not brave. I wasn't prepared. I didn't strut out the closet with fat hips from practicing dancing in front of the mirror. I jumped out a burning building thinking only that falling beat boiling alive. And somehow that trampoline found my feet and I landed free from that agony. I found her there waiting, ribbons in her hair hanging like pieces of forgotten dreams, recalled like songs played in the perfect key to unlock me.

Is a bird brave for flying? A squid for deep diving? I'm not brave I'm just born this way and no bigot alive can take it. Go on, tell me I'm ugly, I find it affirming to my womanhood when you try to tie inherent worthiness to my appearances. Tell me to repent, you see the Bible like fences on a racetrack, I see it like sign posts and landmarks to pull us out of the wilderness. I saw through the old me and didn't know who remained until God told me to be the person they made me, and I couldn't give that to the bigots if I wanted to.