DARK GENESIS by AJ Hayes

I was so pleased and excited to receive a tale by AJ Hayes at TK'n'C, being a great admirer of his noir and poetry. This story is a chilling and beautiful other side to his dark demeanour - and I hope you'll join me in bidding AJ welcome with...

DARK GENESIS

I am a thousand million years old and you know my name. You think there is more than one of me, but there, you're wrong. I am and have been and ever will be, alone. You have grown wiser these days with your science and data machines tracking some of my deeds. The ones I've let you know. You've found my places. The ones I used to use. Over the years you've inched closer and closer to me. And now, you're outside my final stand. Our final stand I should say, mine and hers. Backs to the granite walls we wait in the flickering light.

"Kiss me, love.” she says, her trellised scarlet hair loose and flaming down her back.

I do. Long and slow and sharp.

The amethyst stain of blood marks my claim between her breasts.

“Yes,” she says slow and death drowsy. “Yes.”

I lift my lips from her flesh that is my flesh.

“Remember the garden?” I ask and she nods and sleeps in my arms.

“Goodnight, Lilith,” I whisper and turn to face the great, brass-bound doors as they fall and your chain guns speak and a thousand thousand needles of cold iron shred us into a thousand thousand tiny pieces.

***

You were right about one thing you thought you knew about me. You were right in thinking it would take me a long time to reassemble my body from the tiny, bloody bits you made of it. It would have taken me eons to do that. You were perfectly correct to use the needle guns. It was brilliant.

The other thing you thought you knew though . . . was wrong.

***

I wake floating in the darkness of the primal deep. In my arms Lilith stirs and looks about us, her green eyes soft with sleep.

“Ah,” she murmurs. “Again.”

“Yes,” I answer.

“They were much more clever this time.”

“Yes.”

I gather her closer and let my nails lightly caress her. She shivers and her hair trails across my chest.

“But not clever enough,” she says.

“No.” I say and cup her tight curved belly. “They thought that fire would save them.”

Her lips track slow and soft on my chest and abdomen.

“Foolishness,” she whispers and moves further down.

“Yes,” I say.

***

You sought and scraped and collected every microscopic scrap of us, sealed us in a lead sarcophagus and placed us in your needle-pointed rocket. Then you fired us into the sun because you knew that the only thing that could destroy us was sunlight. You knew that we flamed into oblivion when the sun's rays struck us because we were, after all, the children of darkness. And, as everyone knew, light was the enemy of dark.

Pah! The sun has never hated us. The sun loves us. We burn in the sun because our very darkness incites the sunlight to greater glory. We are kerosine to its flame. Even sun rays weakened by ninety-three million miles of travel burn a hundred times hotter than the surface of Sol itself when we are engulfed by them.

Thus, when your rocket blew apart and the lead box around us melted and scattered our bits of flesh across the heart of the sun, that star heated instantly to a billion billion degrees hotter than it had ever burned. So hot, it slashed its exploding flames across the face of the cosmos in a microsecond and tore a hole in time. So hot that when the explosion became an implosion, it sucked the entire universe down into a shimmering bubble about the size of a beach ball.

And there was darkness on the face of the deep and the universe was void.

Except for us.

***

Lilith slides like lava up my body and poises above me, her mouth wide and our tongues dance a ballet. I hold her hips and slowly lower her. She gasps and her legs widen while she tightens around me.

“Father,” she says as her body thrusts slow and deep. “It's time.”

“I know, dear one,” I say, answering her movements with my own. “Only this time, I think I'll call you, Gaea.”

“Yes, that's a nice name. But quickly, please,” she moans. Her back arches and she thrusts harder. “The words, Father,” she moans, shuddering. “Now.”

I slash upward with my hips as sun fire runs through me and I stab my needled talons into the beach ball universe and it explodes into being.

“Let there be light,” I say.

And there is.

__________________________________

BIO: AJ Hayes lives in a small town near San Diego and he admires that particular patch of crazy a lot. Southern California is a never ending source of the weird and goofy and just plain scary and he finds comfort in that.

He's been published around the web and in a couple of anthologies. He finds great comfort in PT Barnum's saying about "Fooling all of the people some of the time."