She’d never made a comparison, didn’t understand the concept of something being preferable to something else. A certain animal might be tall and another short or red or horned but these differences didn’t provoke an opinion. For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. Incomprehensible to a woman who hadn’t been a child, hadn’t come down with the mumps, hadn’t at the age of twelve panicked over the blood and pain of her first menstrual cycle, hadn’t been summoned by her bickering parents and told to choose sides. She never chose. Choice implies taking this and not that. She closed her fingers around whatever was in front of her.

The ground was soft and she sprawled on it without fear of attack. Danger didn’t exist yet and without it, no creature fled a sharp toothed predator that ran faster than it did. Her teeth had been shaped to pierce the skin of various fruits and gently tear at their flesh.

She’d been the last to arrive, was the solution to a problem that had gone unnoticed until after God breathed life into Adam’s nostrils, planted the garden and placed him there to guard and augment it, his endless life spent alone.

God’s Oneness suited and defined Him while Adam failed to flourish as a solitary. To remedy this, God created the beasts in the field and the fowl of the air, each with a mate to increase their species. Still, as beautiful as some of these creatures were, as loyal and eager to gaze at him with their gentle eyes, Adam remained unique and overburdened. The situation was finally fixed when God fashioned Eve from one of his ribs.

She’d been made from him, for him, to fulfill set purposes—to help preserve and advance the garden, to entice him to leave his mother and father (he had no mother or father), and when she aroused him, to repay the cost he’d incurred for her presence.

A victim of poor planning, he had a faint scar on his torso. Neither he nor she noticed. Still, he’d had to give up a necessary part of his body and be outfitted with repurposed flesh that couldn’t, as the rib had, properly protect his heart. In all of creation, only he’d been opened up and diminished. To feel as whole as he could after his compulsory sacrifice, he cleaved to her until he and she nearly but never actually became “one flesh,” his flesh, since she’d come from him and nothing of hers was truly hers unlike the rest of the beings, which were made from dust and beholden only to God and themselves.

Before the need for her had been recognized, while she’d still been part of his body, at God’s request, Adam had named the animals according their natures. She learned these names along with the names of the trees and their fruit. She called the sun the sun, the moon the moon. Her verbs were walk, hoe, bend, climb, pick, chew, cleave and recline, all spoken in the present tense because the brief past, the current day and what they expected to happen were virtually identical.

She was allowed to enjoy the beauty of the trees and to eat what she pleased with one exception, a warning she heard secondhand. She’d been a bone when God had told Adam, in a manner which left no room for interpretation,

“Of every tree in the garden thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shall surely die.”

Another man might have drummed those words into her until she became so sick of hearing them, she’d shout, “Enough for G-d’s sake.” But there wasn’t another man. Her man was taciturn, a doer not a moralist who mentioned the rule once without discussing his thoughts on why God had given him the edict. What could a mere helpmate add to his sporadic musings?

Her ability to understand the rule was further hampered by her lack of maturity. Although she hadn’t entered the garden via a spasming birth canal, her brain was like a newborn’s in that she and everything else seemed to be a single, light-kissed entity.

Differentiate. If God had temporarily created a physiologist to test her ability to differentiate, she would have failed the test.

In addition, she required but never received the kind of vocabulary list that would later be passed out in first through twelfth grade. “Thou shall surely die.” What was death to someone who’d never seen an animal keel over and be ripped to pieces by scavengers? As for the phrase knowledge of good and evil, she understood and, possibly of, knowledge on the simplest level, “You know the names of the animals.” “Rabbit, pig, elephant?” But evil? The word good, Tov, continuously floated down from God’s mouth. It entered her, gladdened her although she couldn’t say why, while evil was just a sound and didn’t conjure up a noxious sensation she wanted to avoid.

Later it was written, “They were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”

Why would they be? The first person insecure enough to polish a stone until he could see himself in it, wouldn’t be born for thousands of years. While they, like young children who don’t realize their facial features will help or hinder them later on, weren’t interested in their looks. They were fair-skinned with red hair that grew past their waists. Their height and build would have been judged average if the human population had grown large enough to be separated into categories. Other creatures had fur, scales, quills or feathers. Variety was appreciated. The climate was temperate. In a holy garden devoted to serving God, actions were upright and out in the open. Nothing was clothed in pelts or deception.

They were so new, so recently formed by God’s will, His Breath, His Hand. His light still shone on their skin and in their cells. The emotions that plague us had yet to surface. For the most part they were free of thoughts, wanted little and expected nothing untoward.

The consequence of eating too many peaches presents itself within hours. Eve experienced this simple instance of cause and effect and understood the discomfort of overdoing, in connection to peaches at least. She’d been told that another tree possessed a far graver peril. However bewildering its hazard, she stayed away from it without feeling deprived. Lack was another concept that hadn’t arisen. God had planted His garden with an abundance of fruit bearing trees.

Adam and Eve woke at dawn and executed their obligations like the figures on a cuckoo clock who appear on the hour and move through their landscape without varying their actions. Despite God’s warning, they never imagined that their routines might come to a halt.

They also failed to take a second threat seriously, the serpent, a tall, muscular creature that walked on two legs and used his tail as a counterbalance. God had equipped him with cunning, a disruptive trait that emboldened him to test the limits of his circumscribed world. He could also speak like a human. Adam and Eve accepted this skill as a matter of course.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil towered over its neighbors. Its massive, multi-columned trunk gave the impression that a great variety of trees had pressed together to become one unparalleled entity. 

The serpent rested his claw on Eve’s shoulder. She had little body awareness and his advance barely registered. Shown an anatomy chart, she’d have said the weave of muscles and ligaments, the stacked organs and forked pathways of veins and arteries had nothing to do with her, that aside from her bones, her insides were similar to, if hardier and longer lasting than, the meat of a plum. She liked to watch her fingers curl, liked to feel the heat of the sun on her cheeks, liked the sensation of falling asleep. The list was short.

“Walk with me,” he said. Eve complied and as though he’d just entered the gate, a visitor keen to respect the local customs, he asked if God had forbidden her to eat the fruit from every tree in the garden.  

She laughed, would have called him silly if the word had existed. Instead she put her hands on her hips and stuck out her stomach like Shirley Temple would do later in Wee Willie Winkie. Did he think she ate dirt? Was there mud on her knees, her hands, her lips? Hadn’t he watched her wipe juice from her chin with the back of her hand?

In subsequent eras rabbis theorized that the serpent’s diet was more Spartan than the humans’ and that this disparity riled him.

She spoke slowly to make sure he understood. “The only fruit we can’t have is from the tree in the middle of the garden. God said: ‘You shall not eat of it or touch it, lest you die.’”  

Her memory and word usage were imprecise. Or the mistakes were Adam’s. The tree that held the place of importance in the center of the garden was the tree of life. And God hadn’t mentioned a prohibition against touching.   

In Eden, the order of command was God, Adam, then Eve as a distant third, unlikely if ever, to be asked to make a decision. And the sharp-witted, fork-tongued, dexterous, imaginative, manipulative serpent? He had the honor of being the first creature on earth to feel unfairly passed over.

The serpent led Eve to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

“Touch it,” he said, exhibiting a fatherly kindness foreign to a woman whose real Father, the Father of all, was amorphous and largely silent.

She inched back, afraid to be pricked. He insisted. He said, once she’d touch it, she’d mature into an independent woman who’d stop behaving as though she was still attached to her husband, if not literally then in her servitude.

She gathered her nerve and using the tips of her fingers in a hit-and-run motion, tapped a smooth, gray section of the trunk. Above it, round purple blossoms grew out of the bark.

In her mind, she’d broken a law that could bring on her death, whatever death was. While she waited for what would come next, her blood coursed, her lungs filled with air, her legs held her up. She could see and hear.

In an “I told you so” gesture, her mentor smiled to the extent he could smile, given the acute angle of his snout and the tight skin around it.

The tree wasn’t poisonous. What else had she gotten wrong? She plucked one of its silvery fruits and examined its teardrop shape.

“You are not going to die,” the serpent reiterated, one ally conspiring with another, both too savvy to be curbed by questionable threats. “But God knows that as soon as you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like divine beings who know good and bad.”

Oh, so that was it. Eat the silvery marvel, with its pungent aroma and rubbery softness that retained the imprint of her grip, allow its flesh to slide through her, and she’d become smarter than she was now, less of an afterthought, more like the angels who kept close company with her Father in His Heavenly court and were heard with respect. Why had Adam told her to stay away? God had made everything and pronounced it all good.

She bit into the fruit. It was easy enough to penetrate the skin but so gummy her teeth clamped together. In her first taste of fear, she fought to unlock her jaw, flaring her nostrils and frantically inhaling.

The fruit dissolved. A sweet flowery taste filled her mouth.

Adam watched from a distance, immobilized by fear or indifference. She waved. He came closer. She gave him the fruit and he ate.

Boils broke out in her throat, along the lining of her heart and throughout her digestive tract. The lumps ruptured. Rather than discharging pus, they gave birth to intense feelings of shame, self-loathing and rage. New to pinpointing targets, it took time for her to aim her fury at God for not walling off the tree, at the serpent for destroying her as a sport and at Adam for watching without stopping her.

She wanted to pummel Adam, the tree and the serpent, wanted to rip herself open to reverse what she’d wrought but the potent emotions and the unnerving judgments they triggered had become as much a part of her as her arms and her legs. Gone was her trusting, half-conscious self.

She fell to the ground awash in visions. She’d become divine in the sense that like God and the angels, she could see into the future. She saw her expulsion, saw Adam brutally penetrate her because of what she’d “made him do,” saw her stomach swell until writhing, screaming, shitting and bleeding, she pushed two babies out of too small an opening.

She saw that even after she bit through the boys’ umbilical cords and buried the afterbirths, she remained tied to them, afraid in her love of what might happen to her children. She saw one son kill the other, saw her body and the bodies of her daughters with their obvious breasts, rumps and genitals drive men to possess them against their wills, saw her own rabid hunger for Adam despite how he treated her.

Unable to block the visions, she saw her children marry and multiply, saw them caught in unending cycles of droughts and floods, famines and wars. She saw murderers glory in killing, saw doctors and nurses risk their lives to save other lives. While God questioned Adam and he denied his guilt, she saw the long, twisting slog her descendants engage in as they try to circle back to where she was ousted from after she’d tried, in her first act of courage, to better herself. 

Linda Heller received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, had an honor story in The Best American Short Stories 1991, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, won a Literal Latte Fiction Award and has had stories published in many literary magazines including Boulevard, The Alaska Quarterly Journal, The Writers' Rock Tri-Quarterly, Typishly and The Write Launch. She has also written and illustrated fourteen children’s books. THE CASTLE ON HESTER STREET has become a classic and is part of the nationwide third grade curriculum. Linda lives in New York City.

Image by veeterzy @veeterzy