A Work in Progress

(I hope to have this finished by the week's end)

I.

Adam was irritated; Eve was six months pregnant. While wandering through Eden’s decaying leaves, for winter was creeping with spider feet up the back of an orange autumn dawn, Adam could not help but think to himself how much of a pain in the ass Eve was. She was insistent that he go and find her a batch of ripe bananas because of the craving that she had.

“What an impossible woman,” Adam thought out-loud, wishing there was some way that would make his search though the dark garden a little easier.

Meanwhile, back at the hut that the two would refer to as home, Eve was supine, relaxed, content, and chewing on a poppy plant that helped to ease all of the pains of pregnancy. More than just the pain reduction, Eve found that chewing on the poppy plant would render the most lucid, vivid, and surreal daydreams. It made her see things that she had never before seen in the garden. The frustrating part, however, was when Eve tried to explain these dreams to Adam. Her problem, originally, was that she could never quite articulate exactly what she saw—she lacked the vocabulary—the images were not only mere shadows, they were the shadows of a shadow, undefined, sublime, yet somehow prophetic.

“And how, Eve, are we supposed to be the founding mother and father of humanity when all you do all day and all night is whine about how hungry you are and try to tell me about your goddamn visions!”

Adam’s indignation tempted Eve. It made her angry, but not the kind of anger that makes one weep or dwell or pity themselves—not anger in any self-condemning way at all. This anger gave her ambition to prove Adam wrong. So, one night while chewing on the poppy Eve began forming words to describe what she saw in her opium trances—words that Adam did not know—and Eve laid on her back daily and chewed on that poppy and began to build a self-made lexicon that added a sense of tangible reality to her visions.

There was one particular vision that kept reappearing in different forms before Eve’s mind.

“I shall call it a throne,” she liked the way the word bounced off the tip of the tongue to the top of the mouth and tip-toed to the teeth. She sat on a throne in her visions, sometimes atop a mountain, and other times in the middle of a desert. She preferred the former, but realized that if it were not for places like the desert or the city, she would never be able to experience that odd sensation of unfettered pleasure and the almost erotic sense of comfort that she would feel when atop either the mountain or the island in the middle of the ocean.

Eve decided to call this feeling happiness.

All this newfound talk of happiness, naturally, made Adam even more irritated. Adam knew enough of happiness, as he scorned Eve’s naiveté...he said he knew happiness, he knew enough about it to know that he would never be happy again.

(…to be continued…)