In the beginning, which happened to be a Tuesday, God realized He’d made a terrible mistake. Not with the waterfalls, not even with the platypus — but with Adam.
His premier creation was a cosmic bore, a being of such profound literalism he’d just spent an hour classifying a rock as a ‘stationary dirt-presser.’ “He needs company,” God thundered, the divine equivalent of an exasperated sigh. “Someone else to listen to this nonsense!”
Adam, who was now squinting at a beetle and muttering ‘crunchy-walker… no, shiny-scuttler…’, was about to discover that his divine health insurance plan had a massive, rib-shaped deductible.
“HOLD STILL, MY SON!” God bellowed, plunging a divine hand into Adam’s side. There was a wet, cracking sound, like a particularly stubborn piece of celery being snapped. God triumphantly held aloft a single, glistening rib.
Adam blinked. “Pardon me,” he said, his voice a polite gurgle. “But I believe a significant portion of my interior is now exterior. Is that part of the… design?” He then proceeded to lose a truly biblical amount of blood and expired with a look of mild inconvenience.
God stared at the corpse, then at the rib. “Huh. Unforeseen fluid dynamics.”
He shrugged, triggering a minor earthquake in a distant, uninhabited continent. From the rib, He sculpted. The result was Eve. She sat up, blinked, and took in the scene: a verdant paradise, a nattering creator, and a very pale, very dead man.
“Okay,” she said, her voice clear and pragmatic. “So, that’s a thing that happened.”
God, unwilling to admit a flaw in His process, concluded the problem wasn’t the method – it was the source material. Adam was clearly defective. Eve, however, looked sturdy.
“FEAR NOT!” He announced, mostly to Himself. “FOR I SHALL RECTIFY THIS… MINOR SETBACK!”
He grabbed Eve’s right foot.
“Wait, what?” said Eve. “Hold on, that’s my primary standing-and-walking appendage. I have plans for that foot.”
Her protests were ignored. With another sickening wrench, the foot was gone. Eve toppled over, clutching a bleeding stump. “Terrific,” she muttered. “A creator who shrugs at spontaneous man-slaughter and casual dismemberment. Real comforting.”
From the foot, God fashioned a new Adam. This one was leaner, twitchier, and had a distinctly critical cast to his features. He popped into existence, brushed some lingering divine residue from his shoulder, and his gaze fell upon the one-legged Eve.
He turned to God, a sneer already forming on his newly-created lips. “Right. I’m here. What’s her deal?” he asked, pointing at Eve. “Legs. What’s the situation with her legs? Why so few?” New Adam, it turned out, possessed a brain capable of immediate pedantry but not basic arithmetic. He couldn’t count to one.
God, whose own grasp of mathematics was more theoretical than practical, squinted at Eve. She was, indeed, numerically challenged in the leg department compared to, say, a centipede.
“Yes, why so few, indeed,” God mused, stroking his magnificent, intangible beard. He felt a kinship with this new, observant creation. “An excellent point, my boy! A glaring asymmetry! We must correct this.”
“Finally, some sense,” New Adam sniffed.
“We shall create a new Eve,” God declared. “An Eve 2.0! Symmetrical! Bipedal! And for that, I shall need…” His gaze fell upon New Adam’s torso.
A flicker of comprehension, cold and horrifying, dawned in New Adam’s eyes. He saw the dead first-draft of himself. He saw the monopedal Eve. He saw the glint in God’s eye. The pattern was, regrettably, simple enough for even his flawed brain to grasp.
“Oh, you just don’t learn from your mistakes, do you, Pops?” he said, his voice a mixture of astonishment and resignation.
CRACK.
New Adam looked down at the fresh, gaping hole in his side, lost heaps of blood and, with an expression that said ‘I told you so,’ died.
God was now left with two corpses, a bloody rib, and one very, very cross woman who was rapidly losing patience.
“Are you just doing things at random now?” Eve shouted from the ground, where she was trying to fashion a tourniquet out of a large fern. “Is this a cosmic game of Exquisite Corpse? Because you’re losing!”
“NONSENSE!” God roared, his confidence beginning to fray. “I am merely… iterating! Yes! Iteration! The key to all great design! Fail fast, pivot faster!”
To prove his point, and because he’d run out of other ideas, he lunged for Eve’s remaining leg.
“Oh, for the love of—!” was all she managed before she was rendered entirely legless.
The resulting creation was… problematic. Forged from a part of the anatomy designed for kicking and occasional stubbing, it was not built for higher reasoning. It was a sorrowful amalgamation of fur, knuckles, and a single, profoundly disappointed eyeball that swiveled about, taking in the carnage. It looked like a monkey that had been assembled by a distracted intern from a box of spare parts.
The incomprehensible monkey-like creature blinked its one eye. It saw the legless, furious woman. It saw the two meticulously crafted, yet very dead, men. It saw the Supreme Being, covered in celestial gore, looking utterly bewildered.
The creature processed the whole calamitous tableau, the sheer, cascading ineptitude of it all. It took one shuddering breath, lost a perplexing amount of blood for a creature its size, and simply gave up the ghost. It died not of injury, but of sheer, overwhelming second-hand embarrassment for everyone involved.
Silence fell upon the Garden, broken only by Eve dragging herself through the dirt with her arms.
God looked at the four failed prototypes. He looked at His blood-stained hands. The divine plan had devolved into a slapstick tragedy.
“To hell with this bullshit,” He said, the first recorded instance of divine swearing. He vanished in a puff of ozone, leaving behind a faint note scrawled on a nearby banana leaf.
It read: ‘Gone to study anatomy. Back later. If anything breathes, kill it.’
Dimitry Partsi is a writer of absurdist fiction, satire, and surreal comedy. https://medium.com/@dimitry.partsi
Published 10/30/25