The Burning Bush

                       … I learnedThey suffer here who sinned in carnal things—Their reason mastered by desire, suborned.

—Dante, Inferno, Canto V

Nora Serafini had a toy cash register made of cheap, painted tin. The register was about one-quarter the size of a real one, but it worked, popping numbers up in a small window, ringing a shrill bell each time the money drawer slid open.

Her brothers and I were playing Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots just across the living room. Mark was handling the Blue Bomber while the younger Chris and I alternated turns with the Red Rocker, trying our very best to dislodge our opponent's grotesque, spring-loaded head.

My childhood was steeped in violence and plastic, so the battling robots should have held all of my attention, yet that day I found myself unable to stop glancing over toward Nora, standing at the coffee table, ringing up brightly colored toy fruit for no one in particular.

The term "forbidden fruit" refers to the prohibited apple tree from the book of Genesis. In actuality, scholars believe the name of the tree, as found in ancient texts, is more closely translated as pomegranate, or quince.

It hardly matters. What was forbidden was never literally the illicit fruit but instead something meant more metaphorically—knowledge, sex, or quince-shaped parts of the human anatomy.

If Eve had offered Adam a pomegranate, what would he have said?

No, thank you, my dearest. Too weird and sticky.

Nora was six that summer, and I was just a year or two older.

She had chestnut eyes, thick dark eyebrows, straight brown hair that ended just at the tips of her tiny shoulders. I didn't have a name for the feeling inside that made me want to study Nora's every move instead of playing with her older brothers. All I knew was that I enjoyed watching this girl slide the miniature plastic apples and oranges back and forth on the table. I liked the way she startled every time the cash drawer opened.

My memory is that I did eventually go over and play grocery store with Nora, for maybe a minute, until Mark's sharp rebuke bounced across the room.

"Why're you playin' with her? Let's go ride our bikes."

At age seven, my understanding of the Garden of Eden story was understandably simplistic:

Adam and Eve were naked all of the time, which just seemed silly.

They had lots of pets.

Miraculously, the lions and tigers never ate the rabbits or the chickens.

One day a chatty snake suggested that Eve eat from a tree that God had previously suggested was off-limits. The snake was inordinately persuasive, because Eve—despite the fact that she lived in paradise, and had everything she could ever want—did just as the snake suggested. Then Adam did so as well.

Shortly thereafter, God popped out from behind a bush and said, "Aha, gotcha!"

And then original sin, Hell, evil, war, shame, guilt, all of the bad stuff.

For the rest of that summer, Mark, Chris, and I played mostly in a nearby park, riding our banana-seat Schwinns up and down hills, stopping to throw sticks into Frontier Creek.

I didn't see Nora around. Maybe she went off to camp.

Still, the tiny, chestnut-eyed girl dominated my dreams.

Actually, my dream—a dream that repeated itself for months and left me disordered and alarmed.

It went like this:

I walk up the Serafinis' driveway looking for my friends. Mark and Chris aren't around, but the garage door is wide open. Inside, the one-car garage is spotless, barren: no rakes, no lawn mower, no bikes, no anything.

Just Nora, raising her dark eyebrows to invite me in, then pointing at a toy casino slot machine resting on a windowsill. The undersized toy slot machine resembles the tin cash register but with a pull handle instead of keys. She motions for me to pull the lever. When I do, three reels tumble through pictures of cherries, lemons, oranges, watermelons, and finally land on flames, on...