In the beginning, there are two types of animals.
Both are disgorged from a crack inside a grotto, in a universe still young and half-made. A tapestry of cosmogony: liminal weft meeting impossible warp.
The first animal whelped out of the world’s fragmentary fabric is small but fully formed. Later, he will be called precocial. He lands on the dusty cave floor on his own two feet, which wobble, but do not buckle under his weight. Beneath the effluvia of afterbirth—the viscous strings clinging like moss and mucus to his naked skin—he has all limbs and lineaments, and a sense of innate purpose in knowing how to use them. The first animal is a Titan, slotting neatly into his place in the world—the universe’s forethought.
The second animal isn’t as lucky. Altricial, zoologists will label him in a future not yet conceived. The second animal bears no distinct characteristics: amorphous, stump-limbed, and sightless, he lacks defense and purpose. The bundle of misshapen redness plops down onto the hard stone floor. Almost like an afterthought.
The first child is my brother.
The second, me.
•••
The King orders strange beasts of me.
There is a tapestry, spanning the northern wall of the throne room where I’ve been summoned. The fabric woven out of carmine and emerald thread, displays a garden stretching vast and verdant, bursting with limpid creeks and fruitful trees. And in that garden, a naked man and woman sit beatific, giving a name to every animal that graces their primeval paradise.
Whenever I enter the throne room—my fool’s hat jingling, the royal advisors sneering even as they make room for me—I cannot help but study the tapestry of Eden. Ponder how humans, once more, got it all wrong.
“Fool, my Fool,” the King calls, beckoning me to his jewel-laden side. “Make me an animal.”
In my head, my brother’s voice echoes. Come, little brother, let us build the world its animals.
I shake my head. My court jester’s bells drown out the thought of my brother chained for millennia on his mountaintop prison, his organs devoured by eagles, his screams reverberating. All because of me.
“What animal does my king desire?”
I slink to his royal side where I inhale his scent of cardamum and myrrh. In the absence of any kin or tether throughout the vagrant centuries, the king has become as intoxicating as my Titan brother once was.
“A pet, my Fool, something no other King has had adorning his side.”
His fingers curl around my ruffled wrist—clad in his kaleidoscopic heraldry, clutching the exquisite marotte he once gifted me—as if to prove a point.
The king’s childish cruelty is boredom-born. Petty and execution-happy, tender and teasing—the king has been trapped in his palace for years, locked up by his own kin to prevent another regicidal war. Just like our Titan parents, who—scarred by the battles between gods and giants—delegated our births to the wormhole womb of the universe. They gave us the animals and left us to figure things out on our own. To fend for ourselves.
This is how the humans, in their murals and holy texts, got it wrong. Unlike Adam and Eve, my brother and I did not merely bestow names upon the animals, but attributes. A way to identify and protect their species on an Earth not-yet-made, where we, too, had been thrust so unceremoniously. Our workshop was not a lush garden, but a chthonic realm—everything dark, dry, and dusty as we breathed meaning into each animal.
Other things, the humans got right. Adam and Eve, alone with the animals, endless and endlessly happy until the apple. The stolen fire. The god-punished sin.
He is gone, my brother Prometheus, or as good as gone. So I will build my king a beast. And I will pray this time, I do not get it wrong.
•••
Back when the world was still unborn, all you needed to make an animal was godspit and soil mixed into cosmic clay. The psyche knew to permeate the vessel and rouse the animal from oblivion. Now, it takes me a fingernail to make the little carousel horses dance round and round as my king claps and laughs. A tooth fragment to spark the monkey simulacra playing the mandolin in the palm of my king’s hand. Hair ripped bloody from my scalp to have koi fish hopping midair for him, only for him.
But to build my king a fabulous beast—make it right, make it last—I will need so much more. In my palace laboratory, I have no godspit, but titanflesh will do. The miniature jester head of my marotte serves as a dagger hilt, bejeweled in motley garnet, peridot, and tourmaline to match my diamond-patterned tunic. I bring the blade to my arm and cut out a palm-sized chunk of flesh—a graft to make an animal fit for a king.
With my blood staunched in haste, I lay my flesh in my crucible. I set to work.
Fool, my Fool, make me an animal.
Come, little brother, let us build the world its animals._
The two voices overlay, overlap. My brother knew our purpose, our history, from the moment he was born, and I followed him like the mimic that I was. While he walked and talked—a beautiful, golden son—I could only cry and crawl in our timeless cradle. But unlike our absent parents, my brother was up to the task of caring for me.
In my memory, my brother places a small, white rabbit into my arms. My clumsy fingers stroke the velvet fur between its jewel-red eyes.
When the rabbit is born_, my brother patiently explains, it is like you. Not yet finished building itself, it needs to be nursed and cared for. So we must make the litter large enough to survive predators. The rabbit needs clever claws to burrow into safety, swift legs to run from danger.
Rage grips me—at being compared to the rabbit, given fewer defenses than the humble herbivores. I slam my fist against my workbench, ignoring the splinters, the blood too watered down to fashion on its own an animal worthy of the king.
This time, I do not leave the rabbit blind, furless, and befouled. With my flesh as raw material, I fashion keratinous horns, sharp-gemmed teeth, and long claws curved like sickle moons. I grant the rabbit defense after defense. The beast in my crucible is not small enough to cradle, but big and plump as a human toddler. Its fur smells of chthonic dust and ferrous blood.
Bells jingling, I deliver my first offering to the king.
•••
The king’s men, silent and sullen, intrude into my lab’s sleeping quarters after midnight. They do not allow me the dignity of dressing in my Fool’s garb. As I’m led toward the king’s private chambers, the absence of tinkling bells unnerves me.
In his four-poster bed, the king sobs curled around something small and bloody.
“My animal. You got it wrong.”
He tells me how my rabbit’s teeth and claws tore all his lavish fabrics and wallpapers. How its hunger was so bottomless, it ate every rare black rose in the palace gardens, dug up splintered bones from the royal cemetery. Once more, forethought has failed to materialize in my creation. In the end, the rabbit clawed its own ill-fitting skin apart, until its insides spilled out of its mouth and anus, and only the empty skin remained.
The king pulls me into his bed, holding me captive-tight, treasure-tight. Between us, the hollow meat puppet that was once the rabbit stains us and the royal bedsheets red. It feels like a stillborn between us. My king’s and my baby. My brother’s and mine. I welcome the pressure, the touch. My fingers dig into my pus-weeping graft wound, its edges like crimped paper. Sanguine droplets flung into the air, I build the king a zoetrope of light and shadow, dancing overhead with animals real and extinct.
Beasts too small for me to ruin with my blight.
“Fool, my Fool,” the king croons as he wears the dead rabbit like a hand puppet, caressing my neck with its stiffened fur. “Make me an animal, or I will cut your pretty head off. A pet that reminds me of you.”
“Yes, my king,” I simper like the fool I am.
If my brother was in this court, he would be a scholar, even the king’s advisor. Throughout history I will be called a bestiarist, a cryptozoologist, a witch, a genetic alchemist. Above all, a Fool dancing and jingling, making my king crooked animals while my brother is shackled in iron chains, blistered by wind and sun, gored by the eagle’s eager beak.
The king kisses my forehead, settles into sleep.
Above us, the animals dance on.
•••
I lock myself in my laboratory, intent on giving my king what he wants. He thinks me trapped in this palace by his hand—captive like he is—not knowing the vastness I occupy; not suspecting my power stretches beyond my chimeras of clay and flesh. This is not a purpose I knew by instinct, but one I willingly choose. A rebellion: immortal serving a mortal, Titan turned Fool.
The second animal I build is not a herbivore, but a carnivore. A predator fierce enough to withstand the weight of living.
I excise part of my own liver—and oh, I can see the irony—to deliquesce into serum. But that is not all I give. In naming my beast Epicyon—a dog that is more than a dog—I give the king’s pet the first part of my name. Prometheus and Epimetheus—forethought and afterthought—this is what my brother and I were once named. How I was set up for failure from the start.
The king does not know of my immortal parentage, my primordial history. Yet a part of me craves to be known.
Fool, my Fool, make me a pet that reminds me of you.
Come, little brother, let us bequeath traits to the predators.
I remember my brother lifting my stunted form up toward the lion—docile in its incompletion—as I gave it a lush mane and a mighty roar. The wolf we gave a pack and a mate, the way we were each other’s mates. The bear we taught to maul, to hibernate.
The predators must birth few offspring, so overpopulation doesn’t eliminate all the prey, my brother had instructed, laughing like we were forever, us and the animals of our Eden, our Arcadia. We need balance between food chain and ecosystem.
Yet I was never any good at intuiting this cosmic balance. I could only produce thoughtless, failing beasts. And now, atom by atom, invocation by invocation, the altricial turns precocial in my cauldron.
When the Epicyon roars to life, it is sharp of canine and taller than any wolf. I fasten a collar around its mighty, dark-furred neck. The bells of the collar jingle with each step of massive paws. I bring the leashed Epicyon to the throne room. Advisors and courtiers flee in fear, yet the king claps his savage, childish delight. In his smile there is pride, and there is threat.
We stand on either side of the throne, me and the Epicyon, and I hope it’s enough. I am enough.
•••
This time, the king sends no men to summon me after hours. He comes to my workshop himself, blood splattered across his Tyrian purples. The Epicyon’s collar is clutched empty in his hand, tinkling an ominous tune.
“My men have disposed of the beast’s carcass,” the king says, whisper-tender. “It went feral while it slept in my bed. Its teeth dared graze my royal skin. Then the beast turned on itself, until it devoured its own heart. I have kept the teeth to adorn my throne. It’s what I’ll do with your head, if you fail again.”
A sob catches burr-like in my throat. The remnants of my liver throb with each jingle as the king approaches my workbench, where I’d fallen asleep by dwindling candlelight. He looms over me, all-encompassing, as the flame glances off his smiling teeth.
Oh, how my brother towered like a light-haloed giant, and I hid small and safe in his shadow. He was a Titan like I was, but for the longest time, he was the only God I knew.
“Fool, my Fool,” the king speaks above me, a god to replace my brother while he is devoured by eagles. My head tilts up, my lips part like flower petals inviting the sun.
His fingers wrap around my neck, and I want him to squeeze, to choke. I picture my pain-thrumming pulse keeping tempo with my brother’s as he hangs from chains that strain his shoulder-blades, thin his ligaments. Gods-laid traps forbid me from visiting the barren mountaintop where eagle devours liver. Even if I could, I doubt I would have made myself go and face what I did.
Despite my cowardice, I feel closer to my brother than I have in centuries. Yet the king’s grip doesn’t tighten enough to restrict my windpipe, nor offer the reveries I crave most. Almost a caress laced with warning. Then he grabs my marotte and twists its head off, cupping it in one palm while the other holds my cheek.
The blood of the hound bearing half my name stains us both. Back when my brother and I built the animals, he often returned to our cave bathed in red. It was his job to hunt down and slaughter the animals I made wrong. Oh, how the beasts screamed in pain, punished for lacking a creator who foresaw their fate.
“Last chance before I sever this lovely head of yours,” the king says as he cradles me, like he already owns my head, my creations, my own self. “Build me an animal. One that will tether you to me forever and beyond.”
When I say yes, like a held breath, it is exultant. It is everything.
•••
To make this third and final animal, so much more of myself needs to be relinquished. While my brother’s body heals every time he is gouged, I possess no such skills of regeneration. Because of this, I could never have taken my brother’s place up on his Caucasus prison. I was made wrong, and he wasn’t. This is what I tell myself as I dig into my flesh, deep inside my laboratory. As I bite my fool’s jingling hat to muffle my screams while I sever my smallest toe with the tip of my marotte’s blade.
Come, little brother, let us mold the omnivore, let us make the humans in our image.
I remember the humans: inchoate and indehiscent like I once was, but also golden like my brother. Ιn a way, they felt more like our children than the animals ever had. By then I was all grown, craving to be my brother’s equal. Intoxicated, overzealous, I squandered every last positive attribute on the animals, so when the humans came to me, naked and defenseless, I had no protection left to offer them against the cold, hungry world they were meant to populate.
And my brother, beautiful trickster, said, Don’t you worry, brother. I will steal the fire from Zeus’ lightning. I won’t let the humans go without protection from harsh elements and wild beasts.
My brother captured, my brother taking the fall for me, Prometheus tethered and tortured for eternity. If the two of us were a pair meant for balance, then that balance is long since gone.
History named me a fool, so I became one: the royal Fool for all my days.
Animal-quick, I cry out, burned by the alchemical solution that touches my careless hands. More hyperviscous liquid has spilled over my beakers, unattended during my darkling daydreaming. I inspect my crucible, where a surplus of serum smothers the flesh-and-bone tribute of my body. Through the bubbling, half-molten goo, a creature rises forth, too tall and bulky to be the omnivorous companion animal I’d tried to conjure for my king.
My primigenial memories must have woven through the spell, merged by a graft of blood and titanflesh. The beast in my crucible is humanoid, with an unhinging jaw and impossibly segmented limbs. Its too-long arms hang from a hunchback, and a roar rumbles like a mis-brewed potion in its chest. Yet in my monster’s eyes, I see it is a person nonetheless.
Distracted by past and future, balance and punishment, I have made a mistake.
My chimera—my third and final chance at appeasing my king—rises bipedal from its crucible, limned in beastly, human glory.
I reach for the jar of acid I keep by my worktable in which to drown my odious errors. But the monster I’ve created is faster: it slashes a whetted claw across my neck, tearing into the meat of my chest and shoulder. Perhaps this is something humanity has always harbored toward me.
The beast bellows; fathomless rage for a foolish creator.
•••
My brother, I need to find my brother—
My king. I need to save—
I drag myself across the palace, bleeding from the stump of my toe, the claw-slits in my neck. I limp my way from my workshop to the throne room where my king languishes among his advisors. Where he sits bored and trapped and mine. Were I in better possession of my faculties, I would try to patch myself up in my laboratory. But I don’t know how to tame this roving monster—nor how much time I have left, I who was born before time itself.
We are different animals, my brother and I. While he regenerates organ and muscle every time the eagle attacks, I feel no such knitting happening inside my lacerated chest.
The monster roars in the distance, loping through the palace on its ungainly two legs. Inside the throne room, my Titan blood dirties the marble flooring and resplendent fur rugs.
“Get out. Everyone get out!” the king shrieks as he takes me in: soaked in my red blood, mauled by my creation—my own undoing. “Find the monster who did this.”
Me, I want to say. I am the monster.
With a ruby-ringed finger, he beckons me close while his guards rush outside. They lock the throne-room door behind them to protect the king from the abomination that rips flesh; that rends the natural order of the world.
“Fool, my Fool,” rues the king whilst he pulls my broken body into his lap, my back to his front, my blood crimsoning his pristine ermine.
Tears stream down my face as the king rocks me back and forth, kisses my neck. His lips are stained with my failure. His fingers play with the jagged edges of my wound as if plucking a harp.
“Your head, your pretty head,” he breathes hotly against my ear.
Once more he reminds me of my brother, the way I crawled mishappen into his steadfast lap. How I longed for his guidance handling all the animals and the animal want inside me.
Beyond the throne room, I can hear the monster’s guttural growls, followed by its too-familiar human pain. The soldiers groan, too, as their bodies thud against the stone walls. The palace rattles with their cries.
From the king’s lap, I watch the voluminous tapestry across the throne. Through my tears, the verdant threads blur the same carmine hue as my blood. I squint until all the animals fall away and only the two anthropomorphic figures remain—only my brother and I, when the world was still young. The king and the king’s beast and the king’s men—none of that matters for an eons-stretched second.
My brother and I are in the tapestry, where we have grafted our personal Arcadia. We are both animals and animal-makers, we are weft and warp—clay, silk, spit, flesh—and we’re slipping between each other’s fingers; we are half-made and half-blind and deliriously whole—we are born and unborn and reborn.
