Eve’s favourite fruit was not the apple. At least, not that apple. Not the one you think. There was this fruit that had a kind of star shape, and when you cut it in half it looked just like one. Star-fruit, they used to call it, and when she and Adam and the boys sat on the grass at night and looked up, they tasted like the stars must taste.
The fruit that Eve couldn’t stand was the one she craved. The one she found one day, and she had this feeling like, “That’s interesting.” Even when she picked one and took a sniff, it was so strange, her head lightened just a little. It felt as if she were going to fall, but not fall like on the ground, fall as if from her perch in reality. This little grey fruit grew in an unusual way on the ground, near the trees, or sometimes right out of a tree trunk. The taste wasn’t good at all, but the scent, and the feeling that came from swallowing one was intoxicating. Wait, swallow? Oh. I guess so.
In spite of that feeling that washed over her when she found this little fruit for the first time and picked it and smelled it, she must have tasted it. Was it the fruit that convinced her to do it? Once she touched it, did it seduce her? Who knows. Wait, no – Eve knows. Of course she does, she was there. And there was someone else too. Oh, there was that really long conversation with a snake. That was weird. The snake dropped out of a tree and slithered away past her after singing songs to her that she had never heard before, and the snake had even danced on the branch, bending its body into the shape of two legs so it could do a jig. After that it snapped its tail like cracking a whip, and the sky turned purple, with diamonds embedded in it in the most beautiful pattern one ever imagined. The prettiest sky she could recall.
What had that snake said to her in that conversation? It was all kind of fuzzy right now. Maybe if she went back to that tree she would find the snake again and be able to ask. But… no, that makes no sense. Conversations with snakes didn’t really happen. Then again, maybe. After all, this fruit was unique, maybe the snake was too. And maybe those ideas that remained with her now, those ideas about understanding, about really knowing the things she had always wondered… maybe she could finally know those things. She and Adam asked God so many times, and even cried out to him after he stopped walking with them in the garden. But so many things were unanswered.
The periods of darkness had always separated the days for Eve and Adam. Before she found the little fruits, the number was countless. And after everything escalated, all she could do was count them.
So she said to Adam, “You have to try this. I need you to tell me if it’s the same for you. I need to know if it makes you hear the animals’ voices. I need to know if it makes you learn the things we both long to know, and if those things are easier for you to understand than for me. Adam, tell me. Please.”
When Adam sniffed the fruit, it opened his spirit in a way he did not expect. Just a little. Adam thought that since he was stronger, surely he would not be affected as Eve was.
When Adam ate not one, but two of the little fruits, he saw what Eve saw. The sky, the colours, the blood in his own veins coursing as a river, and the shape of his body threatening to burst as does the throat of a bullfrog. The purple air grew thick around him and caught him in a swirl, a jetty that only he could see. Eve stared, wondering what Adam was seeing, and so she followed. But she did not enter his world, they just swirled around each other in these bubbles of flesh that they lived in for hours.
They woke up with the sun in their eyes, by the water’s edge. Far from the tree with the fruits. Eve asked Adam if he saw the snake, and he said no. After a moment of squinting in silence, Adam asked Eve if she saw the things he saw. She didn’t know for sure but she decided to say yes. They both glanced at each other and then away. Adam rose cautiously and walked into the bushes, only to emerge carrying a handful of large fig leaves. Adam and Eve both recognized the coverings that they had felt in their prior stupor, and they fashioned them with vines and twigs and leaves.
Eve and Adam were both thinking hard, silently. Thinking about what they saw, what they felt, what they thought, including that moment before that moment. The moment when they hung on the cusp of tasting that fruit. That moment when they felt something that was hard to place, that suggested perhaps this fruit was not good to eat. And they both wondered why they did anyway. Did one dare the other? Not really. Not with words. Had they pushed themselves from pride? Did this really matter anyway? It was just a fruit, right? Right?
As Adam and Eve walked one day, clad in their protective leaves, they crossed the usual stream on a log, as they often did. Upon landing on the other side, the log dislodged under the jaunt of Adam’s foot, and as he landed on the bank, the log floated away and they could not return. As they looked around, they realized there were no other logs, and the trees had ceased to grow along this bank. The water had risen higher than ever before and it seemed they might never return from where they came.
They slept by that stream for many nights. On colder nights, they kept a fire, and they gathered more leaves to keep warm. In fact they built a small shelter of leaves for days when it rained. And just as the animals hunted each other for food, Adam began to hunt the animals. He caught rabbits, small birds, and fish. They warmed these by the fire and ate them. They always ate what fruit they could find from the trees, but the garden was not nearly as plentiful on this side of the stream. Eve’s favourite was the times when the star-fruit tree provided for them. Skins from the rabbits were more durable and much warmer than the leaves, and Eve learned how to fashion these into clothing.
One night, after Eve had been feeling her body change for a long time, she gave birth to the first person she and Adam had seen other than themselves. They called him Cain. Adam told Eve of the days he spent alone, before finding her, and she now felt that sense of finding family too. It happened again, and this time Eve anticipated with joy the birth of another son, Abel. Other children were born, and this camp beside the stream became a village. They harvested, and hunted, and fished, and they loved to lay on the grass together and look up at the sky, and eat star-fruit even while the juices ran down their faces.
Adam and Eve both knew about the fruit since they discovered it long ago. They knew that it had a darkness to it. When walking through the garden with Cain, he had to explain to him not to touch it, much less eat it. Cain knew then that he must follow in his father’s footsteps. After all, Cain was to become a man as his father was, and therefore, he must know all the things his father knew. He had no choice.
The first time Cain ate the fruit, he walked straight into his brother Abel and bruised him with his brutish stumble. Abel was a bit frightened, but when he next saw his brother, everything seemed normal and so life continued to be normal. After a time, it seemed that half the time when Cain came around, he was in his stupor. Abel wondered if he was dying, and so he asked his mother. Eve shrieked inside, but outside it was only a look of terror that escaped her. Despite Adam’s continued warnings, Cain’s consumption of the fruit grew more and more regular and the entire village was aware. Some of Cain’s siblings wanted to find out more, and to try it, while some were in dismay for him.
And then. One morning when the sunshine awoke Cain lying in a field, while still intoxicated, he recalled that it was time for him to join the family in making offerings to God. Now. He rushed off and joined them. Cain grabbed some stalks from his best harvest field as he rushed back toward the village, intending to offer these to God. When he found that Abel’s offering of an animal was more favourable to God than his own, Cain was angry. When everyone began to disperse, Cain asked Abel desperately to walk with him. They walked back toward Cain’s best field. Abel lamented Cain’s condition, clearly compromised now, as on so many other days. Again, Cain grew angry. He had wanted to offer Abel the fruit. The fruit that he had found, perfected, and even nurtured. Cain’s skill was with the land. Cain could make things grow. In a rage of purple haze, Cain flew at his brother and knocked him down, and with his eyes immersed in his own swollen world, Cain beat his brother to death with visions dancing before him.
The village was sad. God spoke loudly in Cain’s sober head. Eve cried as often as she thought about her children. Adam grew stoic and spent many days and nights yearning for that feeling of God’s presence in front of him. God never left Adam’s heart, but Adam was lonely in a way that he had not known in his early days in the old garden, on the other side of the stream. The village grew up to be a kingdom, and kingdoms were born of it. Cain wandered the earth, cursed to live his long days with guilt in his heart, and no land to settle on. Eve told her daughters of the day she found the fruit, and listened to the snake talking, and watched it dancing, and her daughters told their husbands. Adam told his sons of the lament that grew from a moment when he could have thought otherwise, and had not the wisdom to choose another path.