"The Desert Places" by Troy's Work Table.
Sidewalk chalk wash, sidewalk chalk, chalk pastels, and charcoal pencil on 12" x 12" concrete board.
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"And she shone yellow and red and matted hair in the light of my eyes. And she sweated in the heat of my breath." and "And when the man returned from the garden, dried-bloody and dirt-filthy and sticky from naming still more animals..." and "And I named the man 'mortal' and I named him 'returned to the dust' and I named all his days 'fruitless and weary.' And when I finally spat him out, I named him a pile of pulped flesh and ground bone and gristle."
—from chapter 2 of The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss
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I'm not quite sure exactly what The Desert Places is. It's not really a novel. It's not really a collection of poems. I suppose it's a series of prose poems that dabble in the mythology and stories of the Old Testament.
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Chapter 2 is the story of the Fall from the viewpoint of a god of some sort, although not the Creator God. Perhaps he is the demiurge of Gnosticism, the Adversary of the book of Job, Satan of Christianity, the serpent in the Garden (although he claims there is no fruit of the tree of good and evil and he is no talking snake). He is obviously operating in his own interest.
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Regardless of the mythos in which Sparks and Kloss are playing and utilizing for their dark take on the stories of Creation and Fall, the Man and the Woman still end up in the same place as they do in the source material: mortal, suffering, "returned to dust," broken, and expelled from "paradise."
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And then there is a devouring, as Kronos to his children. We are in the primordial myths of the Titans. We await the child who will cut open the stomach of the father and rescue his siblings but none is here offered.
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