#adamsreprise

[thefinishpiece]

Adam’s Reprise

If I could, I would build Eden for you.

Not the one with the fancy ribs, but that bone-maiden, wrenched from hideous immobility to beautiful movement by a spare set of spears—maybe this is all too much?

The music is higher, in the corners of the ceiling, hovering just above everybody else, their scalps itched by it, ears puffing in opposite direction to concentrate on the conversations: up and down, through and through, all around, innocent or guilty, granite or marble. How about neither?

Can we ask to be nothing but spare moments waiting for anything to happen?

A fire. A flood. A meteor slamming the Earth astride. So we roam without reason through an infinite black, until we all freeze to death—or worse, until we all bore to death. Some things never change. God learned that the hard way.

Give her a rib, she will thank you for a day; give her an apple, she will disregard you for an eternity. Minus the snake. Figure that equation. Your fallen angel making a fool of you in front of your own created guests. And now you have to ask: whose party is it anyway?

If I should—I should put on a party for you. Invite all our friends and family. Somewhere beyond the curling noise of every little thing wrong, which seems to be going wrong all at once, all the time, never ceasing to be a troublesome tick on your temper.

Perhaps she ate the apple out of tantrum?

There would be nice champagne, bubbly and golden like liquid Olympus siphoned in to a bottle. Those tiny glasses with the stirring stems, almost like a wisp between your fingers, between the middle of something more than ethereal—but we are all living in ephemeral glasses. Oh, they may say there is Optimism or Pessimism or Compromise, but truly we are phantom cases holding recycled soul, waiting for our chance to spill and feel something real. Ground has never been so appealing.

Make me clap. Make me applaud you as you walk on by. Hold the whole kingdom for ransom unless they bow and cry while you wander the crowd. I could make all the sense in the world for you and it still would not be enough. Nothing ever will be.

Do you not get it?

She was not deceived by the serpent; she was received by it. She was once nothing before being forcibly ripped to life, out of someone else’s body no less. Then she was forbidden to ever feast on the answer of how it was done. Of why all this beauty existed and why she could feel it and love everything. It was unfair to her. All God could muster in rebuttal was to say, Trust me.

But that answer did not satiate her appetite. She longed for a better meal. When the scaly-demon arrived, it did not even have to convince her—her fingers were already naked on the scarlet-skin surface. If there was even a nibbling of hesitation, it was gone after seeing those fangs and hearing those magic words… Do what thou want.

And then came the bite which sealed the world within its own bubble forever.