The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

An Infinite Series of Adams and Eves
by Amanda Worthington

Eve could not hide the gold that filled her veins

And had no desire to

She longed only to reach Adam and speak

of the fire she’d tamed in her solitude

Their garden consisted not only of flowers but stars

Each with their own planets and moons… and planters and harvesters

Strange beings that bore their names

But who had been put into bodies that best suited their own stations

.

She was warm with knowing

Her eyes like seeing stones

As she found him praying

And handed him a bit of the fruit

And to her credit, Adam never asked from which tree

It had been plucked

And soon Orobouros was slithering

Beneath his skin too

And he saw that there were other Adams

And an infinite series of Eves

And Edens without number

And he grew golden in the twilight

.

And when the sun set Adam and Eve could see by one another

But when God’s voice boomed in the deep

They knew they must feign sleep

As he wished them not to move in the darkness

In which things are still being shaped

And they hid but God found them by their golden light

.

You have eaten of the fruit I denied you

I give you access to all good things

And you eat of Truth

The consequence is connection to pain you can’t name

Hurt that’s not always yours

Knowledge that means nothing

Because your brains cannot comprehend its meaning

You will cry out for dark by the end

But the night will never come to give you rest

In sleep you will walk the forbidden plains

And you will wake confused about what you’ve seen

And you will feel incomplete until your dying day

.

You might have been self-contained

But you have opened yourself to the unraveling of the universe

You have chosen knowing over peace, wisdom over comfort, the mystic’s tears over the adherent’s smile

And you have chosen this fate for all of your kind everywhere, across space and all of time.

So when you feel loathed and can’t name the gaze that bores into you, you’ll know why

Pain was born when you chose to desecrate the holy knight with your need to know

.

And Adam and Eve shrank in misery

As their sentence was pronounced

Eve growing hungry

And Adam growing angry

And neither of them thinking much of redemption

As their counterparts warred on worlds beyond their imagining

.

Fiction © Copyright Amanda Worthington.
Image courtesy of Pixabay