GENESIS 3:15
Let’s say Adam and Eve never eat the apple. Adam takes two stones and smashes the snake’s head between them, and the Lord says, This is good. Eve remains naked, and the Lord says, This, too, is good.
Let’s say the snake was a man, and Adam is a man, and the Lord is not just a man but a man just the same, and so Eve only knows herself different when she looks into the water and sees herself, naked.
Centuries later, you are the only woman in a room full of men. They are all your friends, and so there is no fear today, only laughter, or maybe it’s that the fear is too busy laughing to know itself any different. Regardless, they all love you.
You make a joke, you speak of sex and forget that the sacrifice should stay silent on the altar, and all your friends laugh except one.
You joke, If you did that, I would— and he says, If you did that, I would kick you in the stomach, and you are silent, he says, I would push you down the stairs, and you are silent, you remember that your friend is not just a man but a man just the same. He keeps joking and your body remains the joke, the joke is only as good as the people laughing, and the room of men laughing says, This is good.
You saw this coming, though, didn’t you? You’ve heard him laugh before the casket, heard him call the corpse a bitch like a eulogy, like a christening, like This is what I name you when no one can hear you name yourself.
You know this room of men loves you. Any one of them would take two stones and smash a snake’s head between them for you, but maybe the snake is not a man. Let’s say the snake is a woman. Let’s say the snake is a bitch, a beast that bites, whose head creates venom instead of swallowing it before a man, in all his laughing fear, reaches for a stone. Are you the laughter or the fear? Are you the snake or the stone? Or are you Eve, naked, watching Adam silence the only other voice that sounds like yours?
There are some men who want to love you, and some men who want to fuck you, and some who want to bury their knife inside the meat of you, and all of them call you the same name to your face. Good and evil existed before the apple; the taste only taught us how to name them. In this story, no one eats the apple, and so no one knows the difference, and so everyone goes hungry, and only the Lord can name the uneaten, and the Lord, in his man’s voice, in all his laughing fear, says, This, too, is good.
