Caltrops had finished that evening’s entertainment with a powerful performance of Genesis One. Feeling cramped and tight after sitting cross-legged for two hours of songs and recitations, the dogged Antipodeans leaned forward in expectation of the finale. Caltrops stood alone in front of the bonfire wearing a yellow rubber raincoat that dated back to the twenty-first century. Her head was bowed as if contemplating her ruby red moccasins. Then she raised her head, pulled back the hood of the slicker, opened her arms wide, and began to speak:

And all the while the whole universe hung suspended in a sack of water. And the Divine Fricative stooped down and kissed it and blew into it, and in the kissing and the blowing an air bubble lodged inside the cosmic womb. Above and below the air bubble was water, and in between there was air and space and sky. And in the in-between the Spirit moved restlessly. Then the Divine Fricative blew into the mercy womb again and the lower waters receded and land appeared. But all was darkness so that whether the land appeared or not was irrelevant, causing the Spirit to mull and brood and ponder. What was needed was something new, a new element that could bring the whole universe into being-as-a-whole. With a soft voice the Divine Fricative whispered, Let their be light, and there was light, and it was by this light that the work of the Spirit was made manifest to both the eye and the mind. But it was the Light in the Word that made everything possible. And the Light in the Word rescued the Spirit from darkness. Even so, everything was still virginal. The elements of life were present but the earth had not yet been inseminated with the divine Word. Soon the land would sprout plants and animals, the sea would sprout fish, the sky birds, and reptiles and insects would find their place, too, and, behold, it was all Spirit, and behold, it was all Good.

And behold, thought Thales. It was all good. But not anymore.

For the Light of the Word and the Word of Light had been extinguished long ago. The earth now bore witness to a paucity of Spirit. What was once good was now pervaded by death and desolation, ruin and decay. It was almost as if God was in the process of reversing creation, not unlike the time Cain murdered Able or when the walls of Jericho fell. Joshua and the Israelites accompanied by the priests blowing their horns had marched around city of Jericho once a day for six days. But instead of resting on the seventh day (the Sabbath would have to wait!), they marched seven more times. When the people shouted, the walls came down. But the greatest reversal happened at the time of the great deluge. The genesis of Genesis Two lay in human wickedness and a violence so vile God determined to destroy the whole animal kingdom by drowning. Only Noah and his family escaped by riding out a global flood for150 days in a big box made of gopher wood.

And so the Divine Plosive blew into the mercy womb and the waters rose up up and covered the land. And Noah, and his family and a collection of birds and animals holed up in the Ark were saved. Everything that could not swim was drowned. But the Divine Plosive repented of this lust for extinction and the world was once again populated with self-moved movers and they proceeded to procreate and multiply and fill the earth. And the Divine Plosive did not seek to destroy the earth again by flooding. Instead, a covenant was granted to Noah and all the recently created human beings under the sign of a rainbow, a bent and multi-coloured bow shooting an arrow straight up into the sky. Hostilities were ended. The hatchet was buried deep in the bowels of the earth. They celebrated by drinking wine and eating the meat of animals and birds and fish for the very first time. If at some time in the future the waters were to rise up and cover the earth again, this would be humanity’s own doing. The Divine Plosive would would never betray a promise with a betrayer’s kiss. 

Which species were created after the flood waters receded was not entirely clear. Were there additions to the species salvaged on the Ark? Probably. But one thing that was clear was the Sodomites belonged to the First Creation. As Caltrops had joked, the first creation was a cosmic “real estate deal” (a type of Sodomite crime that involved individuals “owning” sections of the surface of the planet and selling them to other Sodomites after making “improvements”). If God was the original “developer”, Adam and Eve and the spiritually hermaphroditic Serpent were the first tenants, the original ménage à trois whose descendants were essentially estranged from God and creation. It was their dalliance with the Serpent that inspired Adam and Eve to forget they could not be gods. By exempting themselves from God’s prohibitions, Adam and Eve bequeathed an unnatural possibility to their descendants, that they could rule over creation in God’s stead.