Eve and Adam

With a mortal grunt he lifted himself to his knees. A deep slash crossed his neck, like a big red smile. The blood flowed into the wound, and skin healed from right to left as if it was a plastic zipper being drawn. She pulled the blade back and plunged it into his pocket. Then she withdrew her arm from around his head. He rose from his knees into the chair, his movements those of a puppet, involuntary and formless, against gravity.

Carefully, without breathing, she walked backwards across the room, her footsteps making no sound. She stepped around a coffee table and a leather couch without difficulty or hesitation, and went through the doorway without looking. Her eyes were fixed on the back of his head. She remained hidden in the shadows while he sat, writing 'redundant now is Man. turned has history of tide The.'

He leaned away from his desk. Whisky rose from his stomach, burning his throat. He swirled it over and under his tongue and spat it into the glass, which he placed carefully on his desk beside his papers. He scratched his chin. He sighed. It was nothing. He looked across the room, then turned back to his work. He thought he heard a sound. She could see him through the open doorway.

*

This man, a historian, wrote of Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot, and sometimes also of Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth. He believed, and told his students, that 'history is a pulse, pumped by a primate heart'.

He meant by this that man was flawed and complex but his impulses, ultimately, were simple - which he knew because, as he stood in the lecture hall, between blackboard and blank eyes, he could not help himself from scanning for pretty girls. When his pen marked the page with ancient roman symbols, with commas and full stops and colons, his quest was not truth but immortality.

And, though he hated his job and would leave in an instant if he could, he would just as happily flare his nostrils, beat his foot on the ground, charge headlong at and clash heads with any other beastly professor who came before him in the mortal clash for immortality.

*

This woman was an agent of the future. She knew in her heart that the light of gravity was flickering, and oceans were on the move. Where once a wave crashed atop another, now the lower wave rose and arched back, pulling away the ocean like a scab, revealing a landscape of shadow and rib, which was her Eden.

This story first appeared in the Tandem Press anthology One hundred New Zealand short short stories 4.