The boy should be the creator.
On the first day, he clapped his innocent hands together and babbled, “Let there be light, dada.” So there was light. A brilliant, flowing, glorious light. A light that has illuminated eight billion people on this planet.
The boy is as new as the light itself. Let me repeat. He is as new as the light itself. He does not know the difference between good and evil. Dogs and cats. Sexual attraction and romantic attraction. He only knows the light.
Does that mean he is good? Is he prepositioned to walk the path of light for the seventy or eighty years for which he may live? Is he as perfect as the angels who serve as his brothers and sisters? Or is there always some seedling of darkness within him, like a vine slowly curling and ascending around the beating organ that is his heart?
I digress. I shall digress many times. I sincerely apologize.
On the second day, the boy muttered a few gibberish words, threw his applesauce against the wall, and cried, “I want my wawa.” And so the clear blue depth that was wawa was separated from the clear blue that was sky.
The sky-wawa, the boy determined, would be different from the actual wawa, because he could not touch it. He tried to, every day. He reached up with his grubby little appendages and tried to grasp the intangible.
Every time he could not touch the sky-wawa, he let out a bloodcurdling wail. The sound waves would echo and bounce around the world like a bullet. There was no one yet whose ears these sound waves could enter, after all.
On the third day, the boy got hungry. He stomped around and opened the bare cabinets and drawers and dishwashers and ovens and other contraptions which had not been invented yet and which the boy himself would not invent.
Then, a word materialized in his brain: gwass. It was one syllable, not that he knew what that was. It slipped off the tongue like the wawa he had sobbed into existence the day prior. And so he bawled, “I want gwass!” And so that gritty deep pound-able surface called the Earth was formed.
The boy had to take a quick, 20.5 second nap after finishing that task.
The gwass was leafy green stalks swaying only an inch from the ground. The stalks were rectangular, and in length, they varied. The boy did not like that they varied. He did everything he could to make them uniform.
He stamped them all down with his foot. That just got rid of the gwass, which was not his intention.
He summoned the wawa, the real wawa, that is, and with all his whining, straining might, ordered it to cut the gwass down for him. All that did was make the gwass even less palatable than it already was.
The boy only tried twice. He determined, in his pea-size brain, that it was not effective to try three times. No one had yet determined the importance of that number yet. Because there was no one literally in existence.
So he closed his hazel eyes and decided that as much as his obsession was important, he needed the gwass for substance. He munched on the grass like the mountain goat which he would soon create. That was how he survived in this creation.
On the fourth day, the boy looked down at his body and saw the multitudes of bruises on his body. He realized that there was a lack of light, and that light had meant that, when he had been creating the three previous days, he had injured himself as a result of his stumbling about.
And so the sun rose up and made sure the boy would be able to see as he went about his tasks. However, because the boy had not put enough mental energy into the task of creating the sun, the sun disappeared after a certain amount of time. The first time this occurred, the boy took his pacifier out his mouth, screamed, and threw an apple at the rough location his depth perception determined where the sun should be.
The apple flew 20.5 feet and did not certainly hit the sun.
The boy took a 20.5 second nap, and with the energy created in these 20.5 seconds, he manufactured the moon. The moon was silvery and could be slim, unlike the proud golden arrogance of the sun.
The boy connected more with the moon. He liked quiet and silence. But unlike himself, he realized the moon needed companionship. The sun didn’t, in his opinion, it was too arrogant to recognize the value.
After this, the stars were produced. Their names the boy came up with in his 20.5 second naps: Aquarius, Ursa Minor, and Capricorn. Virgo and Gemini and Orion. Some of them the boy liked more than the rest, and so titled them the Zodiac.
On the fifth day, the boy deduced that it was probably unhealthy for him to stay alone the entirety of his existence. But he didn’t want to be forced to interact with these other hypothetical beings.
So he sat down with paper and crayon and started drawing fantastical shapes: scribbles and lines and triangles and circles and cylinders. And from these shapes came birds and mammals and lizards. And to his delight, many of these creatures could not speak.
He reveled in the power to speak. To speak was the control. A boy loves control.
He told them to populate the earth. In hindsight, he wished he hadn’t. He lost control when he could speak and they would not listen. He lost control when more of them were created by their own hand. He lost control when they guided their own hand.
And he did not like this. He did not like this one bit.
On the sixth day, the boy gave up. He realized that, since the mammals and the birds and the reptiles and even the dinosaurs (especially the dinosaurs) had decided to rebel, he should create something like him.
Maybe the thing like him would listen to him. Maybe he should desire companionship like his creations. Maybe he just needed something to do.
He grabbed a ball of clay, created from mud and his own saliva, and went into a quiet room. No creations chirping or barking, with no light and a single stool. Over the course of 20.5 minutes, he created something that was about his size.
It was called a “hoo-man.”’ The boy erected the name in his 20.5 second slumber, as it sounded vaguely like his snores.
The boy thought that the hoo-man needed a more specific name. Despite his attitude toward his previous creations, he decided that he could not just call the hoo-man “hoo-man.” Then two syllables formed in his brain.
The boy made so that he would call the hoo-man Adam. It was not anything complicated or special.
The boy concurred he should make more than one hoo-man. It would be unfair that Adam should be alone. Only the boy would be alone. And so the boy sedated Adam by hitting him with the stool he had sat on while he created him.
The boy reached inside Adam’s unconscious form and removed a chunk of his clay-flesh. It was not a large amount, but it would do. And with that clay-flash, there was a new hoo-man: Eve. She could expand on her name if she chose to later. They both could. They could both determine their differences later too.
On the seventh day, the boy was delightfully exhausted. He collapsed back into his pearly white crib, formula smeared on his face, and stared up at the shapes.
Sleep came over him as much as his imagination had in his bouts of fiery certainty. It was like the actual-wawa he had created seemingly so long ago, peaceful and new and yet welcomed in all aspects.
It came in 20.5 seconds. And the boy accepted it.
But before he shut his angelic eyes, he determined one last thing on this last important day. It had been hypocritically gnawing at him terribly:
His name would be God.
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AUTHOR BIO:
Maya Rose is a writer, poet, librettist, and lyricist. Most of all, she loves those illogical tales. She loves reading and writing the works that challenge you to think as an individual—even if you don’t want them to. She lives in NYC with her two feral demons, sorry, dachshunds. “And So We Created Ourselves” is to be her first published short story.
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WHY WE CHOSE TO PUBLISH “And So We Created Ourselves”:
We pride ourselves in publishing different and unusual pieces. Author Maya Rose gave us this irresistible, wonderfully reverent—and beautifully written—re-imagining of the biblical creation account.
And we’re even more delighted that this is her first published story.