Free Havah by Tosca Lee

own.
    Separate from mine.
    I lay exhausted. The adam was silent as a rock. That is when I smelled it. Acrid and sticky in the nostrils. A rancid thing laid open, metallic on the air and reeking of earth and feces and hair and skin.
    What I saw in the full moonlight turned my screams to dust in my throat.
    Two animals sprawled upon the dirt, the earth darkened beneath them. Their legs splayed out at a most unnatural angle, hooves in the air. Their mouths hung open, tongues lolling in the air.
    They had no skin.
    Pale and pink and sickeningly sleek, they were covered in bits of white as that which encases the seeds within the pomegranate, as though it had once held a skin in place, a skin that had been sheared—no, ripped—free of it.
    One of the forms twitched.
    My body cried, Enough! and buckled beneath me.

9
     
     
If I wait, there will come that word. I wait.
It does not come.
Smell of skin, skin of the adam. All that is warmth and surety surrounds me. I lie in the bower between my man and one of the fleecy ewes.
A tendril teases my neck. The rest of my hair is lifted away, caught up in a web of fingers as they cradle my head. I am rocked like a babe.
Is it the death? Oh, but it comes sweetly. Where is pain?
My head falls back. My face is turned toward the sun. But no warmth comes of it, no red through the thin tissues of my eyelids. The wind is no caress; bits of dirt pelt my cheek.
“Isha, wake. Wake now!” I am shaken until I bite my tongue.
It is not from the One. Let me die.
     
     
    But there was no death for me. Blood was acrid in my mouth. I lifted my eyes to the stricken face of the adam, contorted in the broken moonlight.
    I struck out at him like a wild thing. I don’t know what I said, though I suspect they might have been the first unholy words uttered. The adam pinioned my hands against my sides.
    “Isha, stop!”
    I would have none of it. My mind rejected his command as my heart rejected his betrayal, as I rejected the thing I had done that I knew not to do. I beat at him but he clung to me, arms wrapped around me—wombtight, as they were that first day.
    Then I noticed the sky beyond his head. Clouds roiled like the torrent of a river, black against the indigo night. The fire was in them, flashing from one end to the other. The trees rustled a violent shudder as thunder rolled beyond the mountains.
    What new terror was this?
    The adam loosed my arms slowly, as though not trusting that I wouldn’t lash out again. That is when I noticed the pelt wrapped around my torso. What was this hair that was animal but without the weight of animal? Then I remembered the flayed forms upon the ground in their last death twitches, stripped of all natural raiment.
    Lightning lit the dark heavens, illuminating the smooth, short hair of the fallow deer, and the markings—I recognized them.
    Adah.
    I screamed. I tore at the skin as though I would put it as far away from me as the east is from the west. The adam struggled with me, capturing my hands once more but not before I landed him a sound slap to the head. He shook me then until my head wobbled on my neck. “Stop! Listen! Do you hear it? There is a storm coming and we—we are exiled. We are put out from here, Isha.”
    His expression twisted, his voice broke, and he shook me again, though I had by now ceased to struggle. “Do you hear me? We are put out—and these, these are most terribly given—”
    “No!” I wanted it off me, but it was fashioned with a thong, and I could not tear free of it in the way I might have my fig girdle.
    “Stop it!” he cried. “It is given of God!”
    “You—do you talk of God?” I screamed at him. “You, who say that you ate what the woman gave you—you, who hold no responsibility for what you put in your own mouth?”
    The adam winced as though struck. I struggled with the hated garment, but he gripped my wrists and tugged on my arms so sharply that I thought they might pull from the sockets.
    “Look to the sky,