Fever Dream in Which I am Eve, Exiting
I.
Enter: God, wondering why you’re so naked, and why your boyfriend, Chadam (preferred name Chad), looks like he just saw a ghost. You ate from the tree didn’t you. I specifically asked you not to eat from the tree. It was the one thing I asked you not to do.
A wasp tries to leave early, but she’s stuck in the goo.
II.
(This is the design, though. The wasp is supposed to get stuck in the fig. Every fig has or has had at least one wasp inside it, burrowing a tunnel, boring its way to the center, watched by an audience of a thousand seedlings the size of pinheads. The wasp is digging towards the inside flower—a system of glands and petals tucked in the warm nursery of the fig’s green husk. Her mission is twofold: pollinate, and birth. She crawls inside. She lays her eggs and kicks off the pollen stuck to her legs. She loses an antenna, her wings fall away, she remains a forward-moving body pushing through the pulp.
She is rewarded with slumber in the warm, tight bed of a fig [mankind will never know this kind of sleep]. Then, in exchange for the life of a wasp, the flesh of the fig purples around it, sweetening.
This classic combination—of noble instinct, crappy destiny, and unsung martyrdom—dangles from a twig on the wind. Right above where you and a very nude Chad are lounging.)
III.
And the fruit that catches your forbidden eye? The fig. The fruit that is not a fruit but a flower in reverse. The fruit that clutches its own flower like a breath. The fruit that will turn the color of a storm as it matures; the fruit that eats wasps; the kind of fruit that wasps dream of disappearing inside of. That’s the one. That’s the fruit for you. Coincidence?
Chad, beautiful and dumb, missing a rib but otherwise has it all, looks like he’s noticing you for the first time. Then he slaps a gnat that dared land on his pectoral, and looks into his own hand.
IV.
They’ll talk about this moment ad infinitum—but they’ll say it was a red, terrible apple.
It just so happens that in Latin the word for evil sounds the same as the word for apple — malum et malum — unrelatedly. So the writers take creative license. They tweak the story to change the exact species of ignominy. Not because you—oops!—ate the wrong fruit. But because everyone loves a pun that reinforces what they already know. A play on words that seals the ending in an airtight container. And because, this way, even if God forgot to make those tiny, incredible fig wasps, you would still be lured by that thing in the distance. Because apple blossoms are a lot less complicated. Because God designed honeybees, not wasps, as the chief accomplice to apples. Semantics.)
V.
Here comes God making his way through the tropical thicket. You swallow, grab a bunch of fig leaves, and thrust them over yours and Chad’s mons pubis. Chad says Jesus Christ Eve this is like sandpaper. You say please don’t. He says you couldn’t have picked another leaf? You say these are the only leaves in paradise. He says right. You say you’re free to go out and find a softer, smoother leaf to cradle your privates while I tackle the bigger problem. Meanwhile, shame—like an audience of a thousand seeds the size of pin-heads—gathers round your body with individual bags of popcorn.
VI.
You are full of fig, and the fig is full of the memory of a wasp, you digesting the fig, the fig absorbing the wasp, both processes made possible by your God-given enzymes, every inch of this scenario designed to trap you in its delicious, sticky center. Listen, if we’re talking about the dawn of Western time, you’re always the bad guy. You’re always in an itchy loin cloth begging for mercy in the next millennia. Trying to fit that little leaf over the ugly bulk of original sin while Chad gladly points the finger. Of a snake. At you. Unless—
RK Fauth is a poet living in Asheville, North Carolina, USA. Their writing has appeared in POETRY Magazine, The Revolution (Relaunch), Jacar Press's LGBTQ anthology Dream of the River, The Fulbright Korea Infusion, The Spring Creek Project, and is forthcoming in the Rising Phoenix Review.