Beautiful Trouble

The Fugitive Eve

 The Fugitive Eve In the first moments of knowing, juice drips down her chin onto her breasts. Lips and tongue learn in this oldest, truest way. The fruit is round and radiant. The firm weight of it feels like power. Shreds of flesh catch in her teeth, and as she eats she knows it is good. He needs no serpent to tempt him. He just wants what she has, just as she wants him to want what she holds in her hands. They share it, then toss the core into a bush, knowing that this is the beginning of death, the first and best blessing. And with the original chill of delight and shame, she is on the lam, running through brambles, plum boughs and luminous webs, past low-slung branches, past the birds of the air and beasts of the field, over the rocky soil, stumbling out of the garden, out of the numb perfection of before into the brilliant and difficult ever-after. She is running and running, she feels the warm rub of her blood-slicked thighs and a thudding, which is her heart. He is close behind her, clutching the pain in his side. They take hold of one another in their wonder and woe, and we call out to them from our place in the future,  this moment, now. We beg them with our fragile voices, Mother, Father, bear us into the beautiful trouble of this world. ...