Eden

1) Adam He’d pray if he knew how, but his brain at this stage can only concentrate on simple survival. Now is more important than a blue-haired afterlife, than a spiritual struggle in which half-sentient men must make a choice: between a serpent and a god. His cave has no bear skulls, no finger-painted scene. There is no chipped flint spear- head on his wooden staff. He knows this: hunger, lust, rain, sunshine, snow and fear. Himself prey amid the tall trees of the primal forest, he’s innocent—untouched by any imagined fall. 2) Eve What was she then, using her teeth to strip raw flesh from the rib of an aurochs? Was there any musing in her fierce female eye, or was there only want, a brute babe in her womb, the predator-filled sky above her tangled hair? Compelled to eat the fruit hanging from the tree nearby the serpent’s lair, she was shaped by a life of stalking and devouring. The hunter and the hunted, she was Adam’s wife. 3) Cain & Abel Surely they were aware of death; as boys the bones of beasts were their most loved possessions. They’d trap a hare nearby its warren, bash its skull against a rock enjoy the steaming brains, warm on their tongues, then dash back to the fire-lit cave to help skin hides. A bear skull would become all they knew of deity, save the roar of thunder, flash of lightning. Adam, in his nine-hundredth year, would offer the bear skull ochre ash, and yet it looked back coldly. Only Abel could appease the empty eyes with rhino liver, boldly going out each dawn with a staff tipped with flint. Cain with his wooden spear began to wish him gone. Never before had two men killed for anything but the flesh of beasts, and the breasts of women. Standing over the corpse of his dead brother, Cain felt relieved. The sky was silent; a white cloud sailed on course. Abel wouldn’t be missed, he thought. Both Eve and Adam wept, and cursed the serpent, though it had never hissed.