In the beginning, God and Goddess created the heavens and the earth.
And with the passage of the epochs, God and Goddess created all that in the world was made.
And once the heavens and the earth were created, God formed man of the dust of the ground.
And man was a child, and Goddess nestled him in her arms and sang lullabies that were like the rain when it falls upon the forest. Man started taking his first steps, and when he stumbled and fell, he wept. God rebuked him with His voice of thunder, and Goddess dried the tears on his face with Her finger of fine silk. Thus man grew, and God taught him to till the ground and harvest its fruits, but Goddess made every herb and tree yield abundantly after its kind without the work of man.
When man grew to be an adult, God taught him the first language and commanded him to give names to all things. At night, Goddess taught man to sing. Man gave names to the dry land and the waters, to the seeds and the fruits, to the sun and the moon, to the fowl and the fish. And when he tired of giving names to things, he sang songs and Goddess applauded as she smiled. Man called God father and Goddess mother.
And man said: I am called Man, but whom shall I call Woman? And Goddess made woman from one of his ribs while he slept, and She brought her unto man.
And God saw that they were good, and He said: They are made in our image, after our likeness. To which Goddess, upon seeing them together in the garden, added: And one day they shall be even as we are.
Gabriel González Núñez is an Associate Professor of Translation at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He is the author of eleven children’s books (Penguin Uruguay 2019-2023), a short story collection titled Rumbos (Jade Publishing 2021), a poetry collection titled Ese golpe de luz (FlowerSong Press 2020), and a bilingual digital chapbook titled El ciclo / The Cycle (Center for Latter-day Saint Arts 2020). He is the author of the book Book of Mormon Sketches (self-published) and a member of the Cofradía de Letras Mormonas, a Spanish-language association for Mormon letters. González was born in Montevideo, Uruguay.
