Note: This is actually a sequel/companion piece to another short story I wrote, but I didn't like that one half as much. The basic premise of the other one is that god kicked the devil out and /he/ created the earth.
Thanks so much for your guy's help, all kinds of critique is appreciated.
Sister Earth
She was not created in flashes of light, but born slowly, in the first exhalation of stiff cellular walls. Her womb was the groaning of a mountain's joint. With fingers veined with gold and salt she caressed stalactites, etched out canyons. Slowly she licked the bottom of the ocean floor relishing in the final taste of warm metals turning to rock.
Yes, the world was created by the Impurity, by his tears, by his story, but she, she carved it.
She laughed when they called her a mother. If she had created this world it would be not as sad, or, she mused, singing the funeral for the dinosaurs and watching volcano vomit lava onto a gray purple sky, as wonderful.
No, she was an older sister who had to bury little siblings as well as take care of them. Watched them grow older, die, while her wrinkles were buried under thick oceans and pores of limestone.
Her father, older brother, creator perhaps, slept on. She hated him for deserting her, for not loving her as she felt she deserved to be loved. Because as much saw herself in those that she nurtured, protected from harm, as much as she loved them, those bacteria, microbes, beatles, birds, apes, fish, humans, trees, they could not speak her language, for as they grew they created their own.
And they began to use her, to trick her, to lie. They no longer would die, would follow her rules when they had to. They peered deep into her secret places, and then when she gave only tight-lipped cave-ins, their own. Her eyes could not move back far enough to examine her brain of molten lava, so she did not believe they could either. But they were many and their brains made of cool electricity.
With each life, each withered fragile limb that lasted more than even a long blink of her blizzard eyelashes, she knew that they were breaking the rules.
The rules did not even belong to her, she was merely their steward, their babysitter. Did they think she wanted to watch them bury their lovers, friends, children. She was no longer allowed to even do this, they hid them from her in coffins of carved out of her own skin.
So, she covered their city in ash. She called up the volcano that had heeded their first emergence into the world that she had not created, but ordered. And she buried them all.
Well, not all of them, she was after all no Impurity. She had not created this world, or set the rules really. She was just the only one brave enough to face up to what He had created, to take responsibility. And the only one afraid enough, in love enough, to try to destroy it. But unlike with him, there was no one to set her free. No divine power to hurl her off into oblivion so she could weep and moan and create new, better worlds.
So, she took her sins as her children. Bearing the hatred of humanity with despondence and secret moments of self-righteous joy. She had children now, she had created something, no matter how terrible.
The humans happily helped her with her crucifixion. They scrambled out of the ash, and sneered upon her. They began to dig, to blow up, to create.
And when they finally created a rocket, he emerged. He was covered in sulfur and wasn't half as charming as she imagined he'd be. But then again, she had scars and parts chewed out of her.
"Hello," she said, as he watched the smoke. Every tree moved to speak, the ground shook even harder than it should have.
"Do you want to fix it?" she asked.
"I'm sorry but I don't really know who you are," he replied, his bemused, wistful expression still half-on his face, which was carved out of nothing.
"I've just been doing a little house-keeping," she said.
He looked around, peering at the oiled oceans, the unfrozen caps, the landfills stuffed under landfills. "Haven't been doing a very good job have you."
She hadn't been able to speak for a long time, or at least she hadn't had anyone to listen to her. So she had gotten very good at seeing, so while maybe he could pear around eons, and look through clouds, she knew what was worth looking for. "It wasn't my job."
"Listen," he snarled, "I don't interfere, I have to let them be, grow. If they don't then they'll only ever be an extension of me."
And she laughed until earthquakes killed millions inadvertently. "So that's what you tell yourself."
He turned away from her cooly, but she could still feel the heat, through the layer of topsoil, through the magma that roiled underneath her pockmarked skin of granite. "You wouldn't be talking to me right now if I had interfered, at least not saying what you're saying."
And her lenses of helium and cirrus clouds dialiated and then undialated, locking in to the reason. "Just because someone threw you out into the void once doesn't mean that you have to do the same to us. You are still terrified aren't you, that you're not enough of a being, that we're not beings. Well we are."
He looked at her, really looked at her then.
The bruises, the plastic surgery of metal skyscrapers. The way the humans had picked out her eyebrows of rainforests, cut out geometric shapes into her once smooth breasts. "I'm sorry," he said.
"Fix it," she replied.
And he looked at her, smiled that same bitter sweet smile.
"I'll tell you what, let's do it together."
"Now?"
He looked at seared ground, at HER seared ground.
"No," he said, "let's try to do it together."
A human baby was born and the mother died. They burned her and Earth cried in release as she could welcome back her child. Now she knew she was a mother, not an older sister. For she could see what would decay and what would be born anew.
"All of us."
![Sister Earth [semi-religious? 873 words]](http://www.writingforums.com/iconimages/short-stories/sister-earth-semi-religious-873-words_ltr.gif)
