I.
Eve and Adam are in the garden. They eat, sleep, fuck, and give funny names to everything. There is no Forbidden Fruit. God does not make a talking snake. The Bible is a prose poem. 

II. 
The fruit is a plum and gets eaten. God sees Their children’s delight—how they take greedy bites, how they giggle at the tickle of plum juice running down their chins, palms, and bony bare arms. God too takes, eats, enjoys. The Bible is a slice of life dramedy about parenting and coming of age. The civilization that grows from it zealously plants orchards and has sensible parental leave policies. 

III. 
The Fruit is eaten. God does the sensible thing. Rather than throw Their kids out of the house, or bomb them into sulfurous rubble, or genocide them with the great waters of disappointment, God—who is everywhere and in everything—teaches Their children. 
Under God’s expert tutelage, Eve and Adam study duality and discriminating awareness: doing and being, inner and outer, self and other, life and death, on and on and on.
“How are we to know all there is to master?” asks Eve. 
“How are we to master all there is to know?” asks Adam. 
God shrugs as if to say, “LET’S FIND OUT!” But Their shoulders are so big to Eve and Adam it seems nothing happens, except, maybe, did a slight breeze blow just then? And if so, what’s the meaning of a breeze? 
God smiles as if to say, “THAT’S THE QUESTION ISN’T IT?” But Their mouth is so big it looks like the long, cloudless arc of the sky. 
God laughs—a terrible, alien sound. Adam and Eve flee, failing to see it’s God’s delight they’re running into head first. 

IV.
Adam and Eve are in the garden. God delivers a series of physics lectures. Charts, footnotes, and appendices make clear that God hopes to be understood, in time, at least in part. Science is the study of God’s mind. The bible is a textbook. Few bother. 

V.
Bird snatches Worm. Cat catches Bird. Body, Beak, Blood, Claw, Fur, and Feather. 
Boy and Girl try to understand. God fills the living with pain. Blood is God’s pain leaving the body. When enough pain has gone, the living become still and peaceful. The peaceful are food for the living. 
One of them always falls—Boy trips and tears his knee open on something jagged in the underbrush or Girl slips and splits her lip against a fallen tree. They discover that they too are full of God’s pain and practice making peace with one another. 
Girl says, “What goes and where, when things are still and peaceful?” 
Boy says, “Here, love.” And lies down that she might know. 
She holds him firmly by his throat and squeezes. He thrashes about like all animals do when they are full of pain. She cracks his skull open like an egg. At last, he stills. 
She takes her time. She picks his bones smooth and clean as river stones. 
What might be made from all his fibrous, red strength? Maybe he will sprout thickly between her legs. Maybe he will teach her new names for things. 
or
Boy says, “What does it feel like to make peace?” 
And Girl says, “Here, love.” And lies down that he might know. 
Amid the tall trees with fleshy green leaves, he digs a hole in the garden’s dark soil. “I know how much you like to name the leaves,” he says over his shoulder. 
She stares silently at the bright, bottomless white of the sky. 
He lowers her feet first into the hole, covers her with dirt, and waits. 
Will she reach up like a tree? Blossom like a flower? Or will she crawl from the ground refreshed and full of clay instead of pain? Something glorious. He is certain. And waits. 

VI. 
Eden is childproofed. The Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is placed somewhere out of reach—high on a dusty shelf, in a locked gun cabinet. The Bible is a treatise on the ethics of knowledge. 

VII. 
The fruit is a hallucinogen; it shimmers, ripely gold. They take, eat. Time turns slippery; memory edits itself. A shiver of fear runs down their bodies and seeps into their guts, their eyeballs, their ears and noses, under their tongues, in their skin. 
Wind-rustled leaves become a talking snake; the thorn tree is God shouting knives; the grassy meadow is a hard-earthed wasteland. The sheltering hollow of a tree becomes an iron-gated duplex becomes a black-and-gray cubicle. Meandering, flower-adorned paths twist into five-lane highways of gridlocked traffic. Paranoia sets in. They wrap themselves in moss, and call it stone, steel, and high-thread count sheets. 
The fruit is juicy but leaves them thirsty. They cannot bring themselves to stop eating. Not until they grow old and their teeth fall out and their jaws go slack. Not until they lay down and the ground swallows them up—them and their children and their children’s children.
Occasionally the squish of two creatures eating can be heard over the pipple of the creek and the shh of unnamed leaves. They talk loudly with their mouths full. They are swearing to the mud they’d make this God-forsaken place better if they could just figure out how. 

VIII.
Eve—seeing the Fruit was pleasant to the eye, good for food, and desirable if one wished to become wise—pulls it from a low branch and eats it. 
Her tongue tingles. She giggles. Her body hairs stand on end like a million tiny antennae. INCREASE. The garden takes on new dimensions. From the swirling harmony of color, shape, and sound, names emerge, grow stubborn, and refuse to budge. Everything takes on weight. INCREASE. Disharmony: this refuses to become that; inside grows estranged from outside. INCREASE. Names multiply each other; Space is rent into a billion billion in-betweens. 
She tries to focus on a spear of grass, panicle inflorescence, rachis, spikelet, peduncle, flag leaf, culm node, blade, sheath, collar, crown, stolon, rhizome, cell, vacuole, golgi vesicle, phragmoplast, pectin, galacturonic acid, cellulose, xylose, mannose, hydroxyproline, calcium 4 magnesium hydrogen electron proton up up down chaaaaa space in space extending uncertainty collapsing probable surging voidness unbeginning luminous ground swaying off balance, falling, hitting the ground, curling in on herself at the foot of the tree she shuts her eyes and ears against everything and becomes a seed. 
She dares not move for some time. 
Darkness. Pumped blood thrum. In-out breathing. 
Everything calms. Attention sprouts from her heart, grows along her arms (which she’s wrapped around her legs), branches into her shins, ankles, and soles, forearms, wrists, and palms, blossoms into her toes and fingers, winds through her belly, between her legs, and around her buttocks, snakes up from the base of her spine to her head (which she’s pressed against her knees—lips kissing their bony edges), and unfurls along the jaw, in her teeth, tongue, nose, ears, and forehead. 
Her body unfolds itself. Muscles tense as she stands. Leaning on the rough-barked tree for support, she lifts her chin and squints. There, at an unfamiliar distance, is the world.
Amen.