When he looked at his mortality he felt like vomiting, though he didn’t know what vomiting was. Those fleshy appendages where his hands had been. He felt he could bite them off and they’d never grow again. All that down on his arms and legs and the hair spreading from his head, all through his chin and chest, till it reached his groin. “What am I, some sort of animal?!” He cried in horror. Then he looked at her and he felt an uncontrollable impulse to rub himself against her. “God, why is this organ totally out of control? Am I an unconscious critter?!” “No, I can think. I am thinking. I can control this overwhelming impulse. I still can speak, I think.”
“Eve, what happened to us?”
“Adam, I’m scared. I feel I’m rotting. Everything itches and inside me, there’s fire, Adam; I’m burning.”
“Eve, calm down. Everything will be alight. It must all be just in our minds. We can’t burn. Only branches burn.”
“He said we would die, Adam.”
“Die? What does it even mean?”
“It’s this horrible feeling, Adam; we’re dying, just like overripe fruit.”
“That can’t be, Eve. What would happen to us then? We can’t live like rotten fruit.”
“And we won’t, Adam. We will cease to exist. Just like the fruits we’ve eaten.”
“How is that even possible? What will happen to my thoughts? My feelings?”
“All gone, Adam; all gone. You’ll have no one to talk to. I’ll have no one to talk to either. It’ll be like being alone all the time.”
“Alone? But we’ve been alone before. It’s not so bad. I sang when I was along. I dreamed. I thought a thousand pleasant thoughts.”
“Because you knew you wouldn’t be alone forever. But when you die you’ll never have a chance to share your songs, dreams or thoughts with anyone again. And then… you’ll get bored of singing, dreaming and thinking. You’ll hate your songs, dreams and thoughts. They will become nightmares and you’ll wish you’d never existed in paradise. You’ll wish you’d never been happy before.”
“Eve, why do you talk like that? Do you really think God would do that to us? What kind of asshole you think he is?”
“The worst kind, Adam. The kind that entices you with the best and then gives you nothing. The one that hides the truth from you. That kind.”
“Eve! You’ll upset him even more!”
“And what else can he do to us?”
Adam felt an overpowering sensation on his feet touching the hot sand. They were burning. He’d never experienced such a sensation before. It was like extreme pleasure; too much pleasure. He couldn’t stand it and started hopping around, but nothing helped. He rolled on the sand and the burning spread all over his body. Eve stared at him dumbfounded. She’d been sitting on a dead branch all this time.
“Eve, look what you’ve done!” Cried Adam in despair.
“Get up and follow me, you wuss,” she said and led him towards a river. They drunk and for a moment they thought it had all been just a nightmare. But the sensation of mortality came back as soon as their stomachs started to stir. Eve saw an apple hanging from a tree and surreptitiously ate it while Adam paced around aimlessly.
“Eve, I think I prefer to die.”
“Stop being a baby. Go and kill something to eat.”
“Eve! We can’t kill, it’s forbidden.”
“There’s no law anymore, you stupid coward. We need to eat and we don’t have a vegetarian God in the kitchen anymore. What would you rather have? Salad or pork ribs?
“What are you saying Eve, what are those words: Vegetarian, kitchen, pork ribs? What’s that new language.”
“Oh, there are many things you still need to learn, Adam. Now stop being a wuss and go stick that sharp edged stone into that boar’s neck. Maybe by chance you’ll cut an artery.”
“Artery?”
“Grub the fucking stone and go hit him in the neck. Jesus!”
“Jesus?”
“Gooo!” …..”useless dumbass.”
