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same relentless grey that had soaked into the trees and the bushes, painted itself over the grass and the flowers and flooded the sky.  Never had such a storm been seen here, and it was frightening, yes, but captivating and beautiful in its own way; and it was when the thunder cracked and vibrated the very air that I realised nothing had

I sat and watched them talk, barely listening to what the angel had to say or what the man was saying in reply.  All I could think was

they’re talking about me he’s telling it about me and about how I wouldn’t

so I just folded my arms deliberately, but feeling uncomfortable unfolded them again and laid my palms on my naked thighs and watched with the sound turned down the moving of their lips, the expression in their eyes, the slow gesticulations of their hands.

I couldn’t see anything special about Raphael.  It looked little different from the others that had come down to see us, and appeared every bit as perfect, but no better.  Adam told me as the angel approached that this one was special; it had power and influence and respect.  It was here for a purpose, and when I asked what that purpose might have been, he only snapped, You’ll have to wait until he gets here.

Something had invaded the Garden, Raphael was saying, an intruder with malign intentions; we should keep an eye out and report anything out of place.

Adam asked what the intruder looked like and Raphael replied, ‘Like one of us.’

Adam was pathetic.  He desperately wanted this person to stay, to tell him stories, just so he could have some company other than me.  The angel had only come down to warn us, and Adam was trying to make a day out of it, and Raphael kept saying, I don’t have long, just until the sun sets, I can’t stay for long, as if it wanted to make sure that Adam knew it would be leaving soon whether he liked it or not.

Adam had blonde hair and blue eyes, like myself.  He had one ankle resting on his knee as he sat, his hands resting there on his leg or on the back of the chair or against the hard woody trunk of the bower we sat under.  A soft breeze was blowing, and the tiny fine hairs on his arms and legs rippled ever so slightly.  I sat watching them move for about an hour, not listening to the conversation (I wasn’t a part of it anyway) but just staring as my mind wandered elsewhere.

Adam’s frantic conversation was dull, and I was tired; all I really wanted to do was get up and walk through the long grass by the river, or wander through the orchards with the fawns and the kids, or eat fruit with the stags.  Anything but sit here with Adam, and listen to stories.
I could tell the angel wanted to get away, but Adam insisted he tell a story of his own, as a kind of recompense.  But he couldn’t think of a story, so Raphael suggested he tell what he had felt when he had been created, and what God had said to him that morning.  So Adam talked.

He looked over at me, a smile spread across his golden face, and I just looked back at him and flashed my eyes as if to let him know that I knew everything he was saying was just one wordy, elaborate lie.

*

Adam had told me he’d heard a voice when he had first awoken, and it had told him to enjoy Paradise (as if it wouldn’t always be there).  I, on the other hand, never heard a voice, never saw a bright smiling face leaning over me and kissing me, never felt the warm glow of the Maker knot itself around my heart like a heated ribbon.

I simply woke up, and shivered.

It was terribly dark inside the wood.  There were trees standing all around me like dark sentinels guarding my awakening form and fencing me in.  I heard a hundred animal noises; chirping of birds and insects, the wok-ok-ok of zebra and antelope, the throaty growls of the big cats that lay in grass or in the branches of trees with their limbs and tails dangling.  I saw shifting fingers of sunshine poke their way through the canopy above, and smelt the collective odours of tree sap, of opened flowers, of the earth; all of these at once.

It was like suddenly having a universe explosively born inside my head, stars, planets, moons and all.  I had been sitting on my legs, and they felt uncomfortable and bulky beneath me.  I put my hand against the smooth, oily bark of some massive tree and tried to stand; my knees trembled and my ankles nearly gave way under this new strain, but I stood.  When I took my first steps, they were in the form of a run.

I cut my feet on sharp fallen leaves and prickly, defensive insects as I ran, but the way got lighter and lighter and soft grass sprang up underneath me, and I staggered out into a vast sunny field, bright and inviting.  Sudden unexpected relief washed over me and I fell into the grass and laid on my front, feeling the hot sun on my naked back, and the ground so comfortably solid against my body.

After a long while of what approached sleep, I rolled over and saw flying above me a hundred multi-coloured birds, flashing past at wondrous speeds, and as I watched a few of the birds wheeled away from the flock and fluttered down towards a gently babbling stream nearby.

One of them, a white, blue-streaked creature with soft aquamarine wingtips and a curved beak, landed very close to me.  I held out my hand and smiled warmly at it, and it hopped onto my palm and blinked its lovely little eyes, sang a shrill, delicate warble and then flew away, circling around me in two wide loops as if to say goodbye.

I was a little startled by its sudden departure, but I knew the reason for it when I looked over my shoulder and saw a man standing at the mouth of the forest.  He beckoned to me, so I stood and walked over.

‘My name is Adam, and you are Eve,’ he told me. ‘God made you for me; you’re mine.’

‘Where is God?’ I asked, and was startled at the sound of my own voice.  It sounded high and a clear.  Adam’s was much lower.

‘He’s everywhere,’ Adam replied. ‘In the plants and the beasts and the water and sky.’

I glanced around myself, straining my eyes.  There was nothing in the water but fish, and only birds and a few paint-strokes of soft white clouds in the sky.

‘Where?’ I asked.

He didn’t reply, but took me by the wrist and tried to take me back into the trees.  I wouldn’t go, I said, and he told me that we could go around if I liked, see more of the Garden.  The whole place, he explained, was a Paradise created solely for him.  And I was his eternal companion.

We stood by the bower which would shelter our home.  He faced me and then said, ‘Let’s look at you.’

His eyes scraped over me like a brush of sand.  He stepped right up to me so that I could smell him, could even taste him in my mouth.  Brushing my long hair back with one large hand and slipping the other around my waist, he grazed his rough lips across my cheek, breathing in my own scent.  His body shook, and his hand slid from my waist around to my back as he pushed himself even closer against me so that our stomachs pressed together.  I felt the hot stroke of some gradually growing part of him sweeping against my thigh, his left hand palming my breast, and then I pushed him away.

‘You’re mine,’ he said angrily. ‘Next time you’ll do what I want.’
I said I wouldn’t, and meant it.

Twice since he tried and twice I denied him, and he seemed to have almost given up by the time the angel had come to visit us with its warning.  Its leaving allowed me freedom to walk around the Garden and tend to its needs, as Adam told me we should.  I enjoyed the duties, trimming the wild bushes and clamping ivy, but today Adam insisted on walking with me, staying so close by my side that I could feel his arm touch mine occasionally.

He assaulted me with one-way conversation, and when I suggested we split up to do the duties, he exploded, demanded we stay together to better ward ourselves against this intruder that Raphael had spoken of.  He called me my love, at which I reviled but expressed nothing, and he put his strong arm around my shoulders and led me like a child.

I wasn’t going to succumb.  I stopped walking and said I could go where I liked, and did he doubt my love of God and himself?  The truth was that I loved neither, and I think he realised this; he said no, he didn’t mistrust my faith, but a tempter as powerful as the one loose in the Garden could take either of us if we didn’t have the other to provide strength.  His face was sincere, but his firm hold on my wrist said otherwise.  I pulled loose and said I was going to tend to the orchards, and left before he could say anything further.

*

The grass tickled my legs as I turned, and the sun that was hot on my back warmed my front instead.  The man that had called to me stood half concealed under the heavy shade of a tree, lying on his back with his head propped upon a mess of thick worm-like roots.  He had one knee up and a hand rested upon it; in his other hand was a piece of fruit, which he bit into.

He had startled me with his speech, his firsts words politely asking my back not to be afraid.  I said upon seeing him, ‘You’re the escaped angel.’

‘Well now,’ he said, mouth full of apple.  He smiled, and his eye shone darkly in opposition with his white teeth.  His physique was distinctly dissimilar to Adam’s, with more pronounced musculature and much darker hair, like a thousand black asps entwined around each other down to his shoulders. ‘Escaped is a rather odd word to use, isn’t it?  What do you think Heaven to be, a prison?’

‘I know nothing of Heaven,’ I said.  My voice quivered, but I didn’t move.  I could have.

He stood, took another bite of fruit. ‘You want some?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘It’s not for slaking hunger,’ he said deeply, and approached me.  He stood so close to me I couldn’t see anything but him, yet I didn’t step back.  I looked at the apple.  He said, ‘God has forbidden you to eat this.  He says you’ll die if you do … Doesn’t taste too bad, for a death sentence.’

I looked up at him.  He had no halo, and no wings.  He didn’t have the golden sheen that Raphael had, and he had no air of power or goodliness.  His smell was of rebellion, and satisfaction.

The angel made no attempt to touch me, only stood unmoving just an inch from me.  I reached out with my hand for the apple—

He pulled it back.  I reached further, and he held it behind his back.  His face was without expression.

I pressed myself against him and put both my arms around to get the apple, and it was then I felt how tightly-knit his body was, and how easily his muscles swam over one another when he moved, like a pit full of vipers.  I rested my cheek on his shoulder and breathed heavily.
‘Are you going to give me the apple?’ I asked quietly.

He firmly put his hand on the small of my back and pushed my abdomen against his, and instantly, as if contact was invitation, I wrapped my legs around his waist.  He knelt and laid me on my back, his hand slipping from my back to my thigh and the other hovering the apple just an inch from my mouth.  I could smell that it was sour.  He took it in his other hand as he lay on me, brought it around to my other side, and when my head turned his lips were on mine, burning me; a scalding forked tongue wrapped around mine and he breathed hot air into my lungs.

I felt the warmth enter me between my thighs and it spread like a thousand tiny snakes through my body; I arched my back, feeling him solid between my legs, and the fingers of my left hand pushed their way through his hair and made a fist as my breath was pushed out of me; moving slowly and deliberately he seemed to be trying to urge me through the grass and into the ground with his body.  I pulled my mouth from his and reached to hold his wrist – intending to bite the apple – but his skin and bone slipped through mine and it was my own wrist that was being held; he pushed my hand to the floor and kept it there.  I hadn’t the strength or will to break away, and my other hand was down to the place where we were joined – fused, it seemed – with my palm turned up to his body, his curled wiry hair between my fingers.

Rising to meet his movements I felt his teeth scrape the skin of my neck, his scalding breath and searing tongue, and my knuckles were bruised where my hand was being held against the ground.  There was a sudden noise all around me I was too engaged to hear, but it was a crack of angry dry thunder shaking the skies, the Heavens in trepidation, I hoped, knotted with worry.

Fingertips traced their way up from my hip, tickling my waist, skirting my breast before smoothly stroking my neck, and I turned my head, opened my eyes to see the apple, held out to me.

My body was quivering, all my muscles trembling whilst his were hard as a statue’s; I opened my mouth and the thin skin of the apple touched my teeth, and then yielded to them as I clamped down my jaw and broke from it a flat chunk.

It was very sour, and though I had no way of knowing it I had tasted the sharp tang of fermentation, and my head swam suddenly with this myriad of sensation through every nerve of my body.  I felt my eyes roll back as the man inside me finished just as my throat pulled down the fruit.  It was as if my entire being wanted to lay claim to it just as an ocean of fire washed through my from my groin outwards, and like black smoke something brushed over the outside of me just as the lava scalded my insides; the rebellious angel vanish in convoluted spirals of airborne ash and disappeared.  I swore I could see a grinning face, dark and red-eyed, flat-nosed and fang-toothed, evaporating into the atmosphere as my body collapsed against the ground, feeling suddenly empty, and eroded inside.

*

My head was swimming from the apple, yet I felt nothing other than that.  Instantly but with cynicism I waited for a golden axe to fall for my transgression, but nothing came, my neck unscathed.  I reached down with my fingers and touched my sex, tingling as if burning, and they came away dark with what I thought at first to be angelic fluids, but which I realised was blood.

I quickly wiped my fingers on the grass, staining the taut green blades, and with my thoughts climbing the sides of my mind like waves against cliffs I stood.  The ground tilted beneath me and I staggered but didn’t fall, simply blinked my eyes at the melting firework flashes of colour that exploded out from every flower, every tree and bird, and as soon as I tried to steady myself the world pivoted on another axis and I stumbled again, feeling against my skin the rough furred pillar of a palm tree.  It felt solid against me, frighteningly so because this one substantial thing in this deteriorating world was leaning too, slowly toppling; I waited for the impact as I fell with it, my hands like claws unable to let go, but the shock never came and I realised that it was my mind that was spinning like a fallen gyroscope, not the earth beneath me.

My senses shaken from me, I must have looked like a fool as I staggered through the long grass and back out into the open Garden.  I saw in the blurred distance a split and shifting image of the bower, and forced my feet to take me there.  In my hand, I discovered, I still had the apple.

The table leapt at me and rushed into my stomach as I came to the bower, and as I pulled back, realising I’d fallen, I fell the other way and landed hard in a chair.  My head hit the trunk behind it and I had what can only be said to be a vision of the Heavens; stars spinning like dervishes on fire, and galaxies crumbling into glittering showers over an emptying pool of spiralling black water.

I felt something firm against my cheek, and it felt very cool, very rough; I opened my eyes and Adam was standing over me, his brow knotted and lips down-curled.  He said, Look at you, words like leaves on wind, fluttering and fading away, barely perceptible.

I smiled and instantly felt knuckles against my face.  More flaming constellations and decomposing galaxies.  I felt a trickle of something warm run from the corner of my eye, and I knew it wasn’t a tear.  Hot redness came away on my hand when I reached up, the same as before.

What— I said, before another explosion on the other side.  My head hit the table, and smells like a bullet rushed to me; wood, varnish, fruit and floury bread.  Something tearing at the back of my skull, and I knew I was being lifted by my hair.

Look at you! he repeated, and I barely heard.

I’ve brought, I tried to say, I’ve brought you … some food, and set the apple on the table in front of me.

Please, I said, let go.

The burred white figure moved backwards, and I heard the slap of his bare buttocks falling into one of the chairs.  He called me a stupid bitch and as he did so I saw the hazy red-green orb of the apple lift up from the table by Adam’s hand and my ears detected an unmistakable

crunch.

I began to laugh, and when he said What? I laughed some more, and continued laughing even after I saw him stand, his pale naked body blurred either through the effect of the apple or because of tears, I don’t know, but when he yelled What? again I predicted the glittering vision of stars a second time, and wasn’t disappointed.

The darkness enveloped me, but I took comfort in those dancing suns, each a different shade of silver, and the spangle of gleaming pinpricks moving like waves all around them.

I was lifted to my feet.

The falling blade of God upon us, I heard myself say, though my voice was distant and deep.  Cracked, like broken skin.

Forbidden fruit, I said, wanting to drop to my knees but his rough hands were holding my arms up.

You’re dead, I muttered. You’re dead.

My scalp burned as I was pulled by the hair away from the table, my heels carving furrows in the grass; my fingers splayed over his wrists and his remorseless fists as he dragged me towards the wall-like curve of trees that I had awoken behind not too long previously, and all the time he talked to me in a steadily slurring voice

you’ve brought this upon is, it’s your own fault, you did this, He’ll flatten us you fucking

but I could see as my head replaced the choppy waters with a thick, painful fog that his movements were becoming less steady, his footsteps less co-ordinated.

Darkness enveloped me as the trees surrounded us; my calves were hacked at by thorny flowers and bramble, and low branches pushed forwards by my relentless subduer whipped back to snap cuts across my cheeks and carve red lines across my chest and legs.

I felt Adam throw me down on my back, the air forced from my lungs in a single hot breath.  I could feel a blade of cold wind cut across my face from the right, and I turned groggily to see sunlight through the trees, and water and grass, all bleached of colour and devoid of life, it seemed.  Angry clouds were gathering.

Adam’s breath froze the skin on my face and neck.  His hands fumbled over my waist, then stomach, then groin; a cold tongue scraped my shoulder.  Teeth nipped my skin as he pushed himself into me, and I felt nothing but rising desolation when his thrusts became more urgent.

The angels are shifting the planet, I think I said, or maybe only thought. It’s going to make it much colder.

A wind whipped my hair and his, and icy beads of sweat dripped onto my forehead.  A hand pulled on my breast and another was beside my face, holding him up; I turned the other way, out towards the storm-churned water, which had the same relentless grey that had soaked into the trees and the bushes, painted itself over the grass and the flowers and flooded the sky.  Never had such a storm been seen here, and it was frightening, yes, but captivating and beautiful in its own way; and it was when the thunder cracked and vibrated the very air that I realised nothing had changed, not a single thing had altered with the bite of the apple.

The hand holding Adam up moved and his weight shifted to the other side; I felt his bunched thighs scraping against mine as he began to move faster, which to me only increased my numbness.  When he moved, my eyes – lids half closed – saw a white shape in the grass just a few feet away, convulsing silently.  It flopped over to one side and I caught a glimpse of a tiny black beady eye, blinking rapidly, and a minute feathered chest swiftly rising and falling.

It was the same blue and white bird I had seen on my first morning, I was sure; in its little dark eye I saw a desperate recognition.  It’s tiny claw spasmed twice, a sad and mournful wave hello, or perhaps goodbye, and I thought that the poor thing must have flown against the trunk of a tree and mortally injured itself, and knew it was soon to depart.  I looked at the little creature as it twitched its blue-green wing and voicelessly clapped its curved beak open and closed a few times, and I thought how pitiful it is, as above me Adam cried out, and way above him the skies fractured, and battered the canopy of trees to submission with hard, cold rain.

*

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