THE EVOLUTION OF EVES Janet Schlicht
They had to make me into a subversive. It was the only way. Or it wasn’t, but the holy men of the day cleaved to the idea that it was I who condemned us to a loss of innocence and grace. And so my story becomes this: that after Adam and I had been living a blissful life in the garden of Eden for untold millennia, I was tempted into evil by the wily serpent and with one bite of the deep red apple, caused All Mankind to be cast out of the beauty and bounty that was Eden. This is a story that many children hear and learn before they are able to read, and so it is buried deep into their subconscious in a way that will inform their entire lives. My story has been misrepresented. In truth, Adam and I had everything going for us back then. We held each other in deep trust, and we had more than enough food of every kind from the garden. There was a serpent, yes, but we paid him little mind. He wrapped himself around tree limbs, he slithered through tall grasses as snakes are wont to do. And we had apples, deeply luscious apples of which we freely ate. But the holy men needed a story that would be good for telling and retelling. They needed a way to create a fear of God in the swarms of people. They had not so much as a thin papyrus with our story written on it, only the word of mouth from their ancestors and the ancestors before that. They needed to write it down. They needed an origin story. They sat in their dark caves wearing their black robes and thought deeply about it. And the image they kept tripping over as they attempted to write the story was me. My naked story was born in the dark gatherings of their imaginations. Eve, unclothed, nubile, cavorting through an impossible abundance. Their own thoughts created such irresistible desires that they could not concentrate on writing the story. What to do with a woman like me? What to do with women, who aroused always such unholy thoughts. The malign serpent, of course. The forbidden apple. Weakness as a female failing. The story began to write itself, and what could I do about it, timeless as I was, living in a sort of magical reality. Sealed in the scriptures, voiceless and powerless, I became a two-dimensional version of myself for some unknown period of time, a moment being the same as a millennium to 84
