Eve
By Jessica Walters
There was once a garden that needed no tending, an orchard that needed no pruning, and a woman who napped naked on the moss-covered forest floor. During the day she watched all things grow and in the evening she made love to her husband in a soft dell where the flame lilies bloomed. In the morning the crushed flowers bore the imprint of their bodies as it did when the deer slept in the tall grass.
Just before the full sun broke over the new world, when the pale morning light shone on the tips of the tallest trees, the man got up from the bed of flowers and wandered off to watch the animals run and rut in the grain fields by the river. The woman did not mind. There was nothing she minded and nothing she lacked. Thought, action, and being were all the same to her. Her mind was like a single stemmed flower scratching the blue underbelly of the newborn sky.
In the afternoon the woman watched the dianthus grow next to a pond. It seemed to spring up in an instant. Other flowers bloomed overnight. The world was fecund and teeming with life. Some days there was a field of red amaranth where there was bare earth the day before.
The woman watched a grove of sequoias grow over a hundred years. They were like her, and not like her. They had crowns and arms, but too many arms. She suspected that they snuck off to new locations when her eyes were closed or her back turned. So, she braided the stems of Black-Eyed Susans into a single cord and looped it over a branch, clasping the two ends together with a blade of grass. She returned to the tree she had marked, and it was always there just standing, waiting. Soon, the tree grew to fill the braided bracelet. Its slender arm bulged and eventually snapped the braid from its branch. And so, she determined, that the trees were not like her, lacking her two restless legs that took her wherever she wanted to go—to the river to bathe, the horses to ride, or to her husband.
In the center of a garden was a two-headed tree, branching in two directions. One half dripped purple fruit like pendant jewels. The flesh of the fruit smelled sweet even as it fell to the ground and rotted under the voracious sun. As it soured it produced a longing in the naked woman for something she could not hold or name. And when she smelled the tangy, rotting flesh, a single twig grew from a bone on her back.
The other half of the two-headed tree grew green, unripe fruit hard as stones. Had she lived a day or a thousand years while waiting for that fruit to ripen? She could not tell. She was told by The Arborist that she could eat all the unripe green fruit she wanted, though she wanted none, and she was not allowed to eat the purple fruit, though she was ravenous for it.
Even in her dreams she desired the purple fruit. When she slept with her husband in the flowering dell, she fantasized about it. The sweat on his body became tear-shaped, purple droplets dripping from his head, dripping from the tree. When he left her in the mornings, she hungered for the fruit. And though he brought back fried fish and pomegranates for breakfast, which they ate under the tamarind trees, it tasted like sand.
Most days during the long, hot afternoons, she found herself lying in the shade of the fruit tree, gazing up through its layers of inviting arms. She drifted in and out of sleep and wondered, why such a tree existed if its fruit was not to be devoured. The Arborist had a streak of night’s darkness running through him to ask her not to eat of it. Surely, he knew little of the world, or about trees. The Arborist often walked in the garden alongside her and the man. But he had been absent for some time. He was not there when she lay beneath the boughs of the purple fruiting tree, nor was he there the day before. She could not remember the last time she had seen him.
In his absence, she got up from the ground where she lay in the shade. She could resist the fruit no longer and reached into the jeweled half of the tree where all things glistened and glowed and plucked a purple fruit from the branches and ate it. It was more delicious and more sickening than she imagined—fulfilling and disappointing. But even before the juice dried on her fingers, she felt a slowing within her. Her limbs turned sluggish as when sleep overtook her. Her blood turned to sap, and her supple arms became heavy even as they were drawn towards the sky. One leg twinned around the other as her calves and thighs lengthened, bulged, then hardened. Her legs solidified into single trunk. Her feet lost their callused soles and became roots that fastened her to the earth.
The purple fruiting tree had turned her into one of its own. Her wild arms grew in all directions, now left now right, now right now wrong. In her unmovable, treed state, her mind became a tangle of branching thoughts reaching for a horizon that always evaded her.
THE END
Author Bio: Jessica Walters has an MFA in Creative Writing and teaches at college and university in Langley, British Columbia. Her work has been published in Mockingbird, Foreshadow, Ormsby Review, Still, Scintilla, Solum, and her short story, “Glass Jars,” was shortlisted for the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Writing.