Creation story #1: 

God makes a woman out of honey, dripping-sweet, wet and sticking and oozing grace, his hands warming it as he shapes and then she is there, the sun behind her making her glow, molten. She is sweet, she melts by noon. God leaves her in the garden and upon returning she is a puddle. Try again.

Creation story #2:

God pulls a water-woman. Cyclonic, nymph-shy, she holds her shape well enough but when no one is looking she yearns to return to the sea. Water was not meant to hold one shape for too long. The pull is too much for this water-woman, delicate and flighty. She evaporates in the early morning, mingling with the dew, returning home. Try again. 

Creation story #3:

God thinks: flesh. What is flesh? How to craft a heart that wants to stay in the body? The next woman is furred, a sharp-toothed beast, her heart stays in but it does not feel. When she is placed next to what God means to be Adam, she turns on him and rips him limb to limb, stinking blood spewing down her rotten front, she is hungry, she is so hungry. God has never seen hunger and is confused. When the woman climbs the tallest tree and prepares to leap for the throat of God itself, God decides to try again.

Creation story #4:

The next woman has half the bloodlust—God thought to keep the fire alive, to have a woman so bloodthirsty signals a want to live, a need to survive, so it is tamped down, it is tempered, enclosed in flesh that is soft and supple, flesh finally understood. A womb to carry something the woman won’t kill. Hands to help others survive with her. When she turns to Adam, she only stares. God thinks it is done, that the woman has been made, that Adam has something at last to complete the dance. The woman agrees to live the way they want, to swim, to run, to eat berries and sleep at night in a hollow next to her lover. She learns to eat slowly, to chew, to curb the animal impulses, to domesticate. But deep inside her, a bloodlust burns. Deep inside, she kindles a need to gnaw. At night she crawls whisper-soft from her bed and stands, naked limbs glowing, drinking in the warm dark, breathing over and over and over again a threat to the empty sky: what was once formed has not forgotten. What was made for blood will return to blood. This thing can not lay silent forever.

Sage Kubis lives in Nashville with her partner and their dog. Her work can be found in MudRoom, Chaotic Merge Mag, and Aperion Review.