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Welcome Visitor! Here, as promised, the first Tale from Tarsisius.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and the cattle, and over all the wild animals and all the creatures that crawl on the ground.”
Genesis Chapter 1, verse 26

I.Edward

Sometimes life is perfectly understandable. Sometimes everything is crystal clear. Sometimes God really is on your side and sometimes there are satisfying answers to all your questions. At such times can it really matter what you look like? Edward didn’t think so and simply didn’t care that, as he moved toward the small hill at the center of the meadow, he looked very much like a flopping fish out of water. He was fat. He was ugly. He didn’t walk so much as he waddled. His neglected muscles ached. His ligaments and tendons screamed. His enormous lungs rose and fell like an overworked smithy’s bellows and his heart, his fat encumbered heart, obliged by the pace of the moment, beat no less fiercely than a war drum. None of which mattered. Edward lived in his mind and his mind, as strong and single purposed as a piece of rebar, allowed for no complaining. It accepted no pain. It would not think of stopping. Edward was nothing if not acutely attuned to the individual moment. Now he was sublimely aware of this moment. He knew it was his. He knew it would make him free; free as no man before had ever been. How wonderful, he thought, to be the first; the new Adam. Sometimes things are just crystal clear and, at this moment, Edward clearly knew he had been chosen to personally sign the New Covenant.

Edward carefully pulled a small syringe from the black leather pouch attached at his waist. He held it up, caressing it as it glinted in the sunlight. He felt a trembling pride and an arrogant satisfaction, very like a new parent regarding his just born child. He grabbed his left arm and searched for the spot where he knew a vein was waiting. He had long ago lost count of the many times he had pierced that vein, but he had done so over and over again until the chemistry and the biology were perfect, in short, until now. The experiments had been physically painful; the science so much more than merely difficult. Now as he stood atop this little hill ready for change, ready for the New World, he had no second thoughts, only resolve, as he pushed the needle to its mark.

The solution in the small syringe raced through Edward’s blood stream to the cells in the outer layers of his skin. He could almost feel it’s molecules make the final connection with those waiting there from previous injections. The result was a large protein; a little construction machine that assembled discrete packets from various compounds, mostly Chlorophyll, which it gathered from the prodigious amounts Edward had ingested over the past five years. The resulting assemblage was, for Edward, joyous, triumphant and evolutionary. Had Edward been a plant, any common schoolboy would have recognized them as the tiny sugar making factories botanists call chloroplasts. Of course Edward was not a plant and chloroplasts were not a part of his body’s original design. It simply wasn’t natural for them to be there. Edward, like all men, had a body that wished to remain fully human. But he didn’t care, he was willing, indeed eager, to wage war on himself.

Just as before, the pain came immediately after the injection. Once again Edward’s body engaged in a desperate, if futile, battle of liberation, despite the demands and desires of his iron willed mind. Always before, though, the pain had been intense but short-lived. Now it was more than he thought he could bare and vastly prolonged. He began to think that perhaps his plan had not been divinely inspired when the pain suddenly ceased and all around him there was only quiet. Edward stood on the green grass and waited for what would happen next.

Along with being flabby, Edward’s skin had always been as white as grammar school paper. Now, as he lay in a sweat, he noticed that his skin was glowing; not with health but with the color green. Green like the grass of the meadow. In addition, his skin felt very warm, not a fever and sickness warm but a soothing and nurturing warm. Something like he used to feel after eating a bowl of his doting mother’s chicken soup panacea. He took off his shirt and stared at his green chest. Quickly removing the rest of his clothes, Edward saw that his entire body was glowing green. He felt strange. He felt a need to act, to do something. That something pushed Edward to the grass and caused him to move about like a person making angels in the snow. As he did so, He felt a surge of strength and a sharply defined sense of well being. Edward savagely bit the little finger of his left hand until the blood flowed. He put his damaged finger to his mouth and experienced the taste of sweet success. Self-made sugar was now surging through the arteries and veins of his body to all of the cells of his living tissues. Sugar to sustain his life; sugar to allow for growth and creativity; the purest of glucose delivered to his millions of waiting mitochondria, without the need for ingesting any of his fellow creatures, plant or animal. At that moment Edward knew what the various and many plants of planet Earth already knew-that the Sun is God. It also occurred to him how silly life can be as he abruptly remembered a little child’s song , “It’s hard to be green.” And he felt important, even biblical. Edward felt like Moses about to cross Sinai, like Joshua before the walls of Jericho, like Jesus entering Jerusalem and like Jehovah on the sixth day of creation.

“ Shall I be fruitful and multiply,” he asked himself?

“Yes, he answered, and as much as possible.”
Suddenly Edward felt thirsty, very thirsty. His first priority, find some water.

To be Continued