I didn’t have a childhood. Sure, I hear from all sorts of people how they hated childhood and I didn’t miss a thing, but still. The first thing I knew, I was lying there next to Adam, naked and afraid as they say, and I looked pretty much the way I do now – well, maybe a few pounds lighter. I opened my eyes and, of course, it’s Eden and it’s lovely, but imagine you’ve never seen anything. Ever. It came as quite a shock – a lot of green to sort out.
And I rolled over and there’s Adam – he looks confused and he’s busy poking himself in the side and counting, which I can tell because his lips are moving, and when he’s done he starts all over again but it always ends up the same way. "I think I lost a rib,” he says, as if I had nothing else to worry about.
But then there’s a brilliant flash of light and a low electronic hum and it’s the Lord -- I was surprised I understood who He was right away but, when you think about it, I shouldn’t have been. Well, Adam was a little scared at this point but the Lord tells him not to worry about it, because He’s taken one of Adam’s ribs and made me out of it. The Lord said He could tell Adam was lonely and needed a helpmate, so he made me, which reminded me of those people who have their dogs cloned. Right away I didn’t like the look on Adam – like the party was just getting started and the Lord said “playmate” instead of “helpmate.” So, I said to the Lord, “What about my helpmate?” And the Lord laughed as if I was being funny and told me that’s my job, and Adam piped up and said, “He made you out of my rib, after all,” but I thought, if the Lord is that big a deal, he could have made me out of a tuna sandwich. But it was an argument I was going to lose, so I let it go and we ventured out into Eden.
The Lord gave us the run of the place, although He did say quite specifically not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, no argument there. Of course, I wondered why He made a fruit-bearing Tree of Knowledge if nobody was allowed to eat the stuff, like it was some kind of ornamental shrub. Regardless, things were going pretty well, until one day the Snake comes up to me – he was very cute back then, with his attractive scales and his hundred little legs, like a big centipede – and he says, “Look, the Big Guy is playing you for a dope. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge will allow you to have meaningful insights and a sense of right and wrong,” which the Snake admitted was a mixed blessing, but besides, he said, it tasted delicious, kind of like a paw paw, and it had a lot of fiber.
Well, I remembered what the Lord said, so I told the Snake to shove off, but the day was hardly over when I saw him talking to Adam over at the Tree of Knowledge and you can see Adam is buying it, but before I can say “What the heck are you doing?” Adam has picked one of the fruits and bitten into it. I run over and grabbed the Snake – all those little legs twisting around while I shook him -- and I tell him what a little shit he was, going around instigating trouble like that, and he all but laughs in my face. Meanwhile Adam is chewing quite pleasantly because apparently the fruit really was delicious, and then he pushes me to try it, and I relent, against my better judgment – after all, the harm was already done.
Well, it was delicious – we were about to have another when Adam and I have the same realization – we’re both naked. Now, I know I was naked from the moment I woke up, but now it felt entirely different, so I found some fig leaves to put over our junk, because if I hadn’t, Adam would have walked around carrying his package in his hands for the rest of his life, which at the time was forever.
But then the Lord shows up again – He’s been wandering around looking for us, and Adam tried to hide from Him, as if he was going to put one over on a sharp character like the Lord. So, the Lord finds us and asks why we’re skulking behind the hydrangea, and Adam, Mr. Helpful, says, “Well, we’re naked,” and the Lord loses it completely and asks if He had told us not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge – that was the world’s first rhetorical question, by the way -- and Adam gets up and says, “Eve bade me eat!”
The little prick! You could have bought me for a penny, if we had pennies. I’m stammering, just agape at the gall of this guy, but then I remembered something. The birds of the air and the beasts of the fields had gathered unto me a few days before and told me I wasn’t Adam’s first, and I had a right to know. Like any other girl, I didn’t want to believe it at first, but after a while I had to admit it was true. There was this girl Lilith, but instead of making her from one of Adam’s ribs, or a clavicle or something, the Lord blew His Breath of Life into some dirt, like He did with Adam, and somehow it didn’t work out -- the Earth didn’t put forth its best dust, or that’s what the Lord said later, as if the Earth had some reason to hold out on Him. Regardless, Lilith was a bad apple, and one day she was gone, disappeared, finito, like a Mob hit.
So, what am I supposed to do? If I argued with Adam, I’d get a rep as a bad helpmate and I’d get what Lilith got. Besides, who’s the Lord going to believe? Me, His second try at a sex toy for the big galoot, or His pride and joy, the pinnacle of Creation – you’ve seen the Michelangelo stuff, it’s like Genesis porn. After all, the Lord made the guy in His own image, meaning they’re both men, if you get my meaning.
So, I kept my mouth shut and sucked it up, although I did say the Snake told me to do it, because the little son of a bitch had it coming. And sure enough, the Lord buys Adam’s story, and before you know it, Adam’s going to sweat to eat bread, I’m going to go through agony bearing children, and the Snake – actually, this is the good part – is going to have to slither around in the dirt for the rest of everybody’s life, which he particularly doesn’t like because up to that point he was something of a fastidious creature. And, sure enough, Adam and I are shown the door, although the Snake, for all the slithering, got to stay in Eden while we were kicked out, and we ended up somewhere in Mesopotamia, which might as well have been New Jersey for all we knew.
Then there were the boys, the twins. Boy, that was tough! One day Adam comes back from poking holes in the ground with a stick and dropping seeds in them, and he sits down by the fire where I was cooking one of the beasts of the field and he says, “Boy, am I pooped! Talk about the sweat of my brow!”
And I told him, “I’m pregnant.”
And Adam said, “What’s that?”
Nobody had ever given birth before, so I was totally unprepared. We didn’t know about breathing, or whatever else they do nowadays – it was just me alone in the field, and a lot of help Adam was – he was so out of it I wished he’d go back and eat a couple more of the Tree of Knowledge fruits so he’d figure out what to do. And the babies! Out came two of them! I was so naive I thought that was the deal – you had two at a time, one for each boob.
Well, right away you could see there was trouble. Abel was a good kid, not very fussy, and once he was old enough he’d be out there in the field, poking holes with sticks and dropping seeds in them. But Cain, different story. Instead of going out and hole-poking like his brother, he’d wander around looking for beasts to torment, and once I found him with his loincloth off – well, let’s not go into that. But one evening I had laid with Adam – that part survived our expulsion from Eden, and rest assured Adam was no great shakes in that department – and afterwards, I said to him, “There’s something wrong with Cain.”
And Adam said, “Huh?”
I said, “Adam, he’s pulling the wings off flies.”
Adam was unperturbed. “Boys will be boys.”
“How do you know how boys are?” I told him. “You weren’t even a boy!”
“Don’t worry,” he said, and he rolled over and was snoring before you could say “Let there be light.”
Well, you know how that ended up. Poor Abel. So, we had Seth – you know how tag kids are, they practically raise themselves -- and he and Cain married their sisters and that’s why the human race is a pack of in-bred morons. Adam and I lived for another couple hundred years, and I kept busy – needlework, gardening, Book Club – but frankly, I lived enough for a lifetime in the first week after I opened my eyes.
I still get the hit on that Fall of Man thing, like it was all my fault, but I’m telling you the truth. Don’t blame me.
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