The Earth trembles under the weight of the still new sun – orange light spills superfluously over the horizon. The crickets, however, have long ceased their lullabies, held in silence by the groans escaping the lips of a woman, drenched in sweat, squatting against the back of a crooked olive tree.

Pains unwarranted and unnatural rack her body as she feels rent by the contractions. Her husband watches wide-eyed and does what he can; terrified yet numb. Suddenly, she lifts her head and expels a cry, and an impossible shape emerges from beneath her. Shocked into action, Adam reaches down and removes his child -- bloody, smashed, but somehow living; more alive than him. Adam clears the mouth of his son, and is rewarded by gasping and crying. Eve’s groans are now relieved and breathy as she delivers the afterbirth. Adam ties the cord and cuts it with a sharpened stone. He pours water from a gourd over the child’s body, wraps him in sheepskin, and hands him to his mother.

“Abel,” Eve whispers. “He comes with the mist.”

Adam nods as he wipes her forehead with the side of his hand, smiling as broad as the morning. “Abel,” he says.

Cain watches as his parents look wondrously at the trembling thing at his mother’s breast. Did he look so corpulent, so weak when he was born? He too felt drawn to his new brother. He wanted to hold Abel. More strongly, he felt the urge to be held, to be at his mother’s breast, to be the immovable object of his father’s attentions.

The grass in front of him is disturbed by a wandering cricket. Cain summons it to his palm, and bids it to sing. The cricket lifts its wings and casts his chirp into the air. His parents, however, pay no mind to this concert. Cain closes his fist in embarrassment, silencing his soloist. He rubs his hands and rises.

“Abel,” he says, and at this his father looks.

“Get some rest,” Adam says. “There will be tending to do when you wake.”

Cain bows in obedience, and finds a tree by the river, where the morning mist is thick.