Katie Scarlett

FIGS

mariadahvanaheadley:

1. So, you eat the apple instead of the fig. What kind of fool are you? Apples tend toward mush.  Apples are often nothing close to as delectable as apples appear. Nevertheless. You choose the apple, despite the millions upon millions of figs that hang fat and succulent from every fig tree. The thing about figs: They aren’t pretty. They look like pods, like cocoons, like something you wouldn’t want to bite, though you might at any moment decide to raise up your conveniently bare foot and squish one between your toes. You ignore the fuckers. You eat the apple, and then-

2. Goddamnit, literally. You find yourself Naked. Nude. Bare. You’ve never noticed it before, because it’s never been a problem before. This despite the scrabbling over rocks. Despite tree bark. Despite the scraping of delicate bits of your body upon same. You’ve never noticed the naked before, despite the snakes in the garden and the bare feet and the whole of Eden laid out around you like some sort of bizarro theme park, until: Whammo. You bite the apple, and you’re screwed. You’re naked, and all there is, all there is to cover up the dripping, embarrassing excess of desire is this: a fig leaf.

3. The fig leaf is not even close to large enough.

4. Thrown out of Eden, and wearing a backless fig leaf, you meander around the world, singing several unsuccessful songs. Don’t sit under the apple tree, with anyone else but me causes jeers from your partner, who thinks you’re a jerk. An attempt at a cheerful carol: Bring us some figgy pudding,and bring it right here, meets with sarcastic comments on the state of your mutual sartorial affairs and the statement whose fault is this? That would be yours, for the apple, for the idiotic apple, though it wasn’t you who took the first bite, now was it? You only said these words, innocent words, really, because remember? You were innocent. Wouldn’t that be good, that apple, so juicy, so bright? That was all you said. You didn’t say EAT IT NOW. You didn’t hold his mouth open and make him. He was the one who gobbled his fruit like an eel, all teeth. You only had the one bite. Now, of course, an hour later, you have regrets. Would that it had stuck in your throat, would that a few nice dwarves would be even now on the way to gently lift you from your glass coffin and carry you home, away from your partner, the blameful, the wretch whom you never actually liked anyway. Never mind the whole idea of your birth. Never mind that you were made from a floating rib. A spare rib, he says, a spare rib in sauce, and flips over so as not to spoon you. 

5. A few centuries pass. All the naked statues get their tumescences covered by plaster and marble and ebony fig leaves sculpted by tiny hammers and tiny chisels in workshops all over the Mediterranean. It doesn’t make you happy. 

6. Still, of the figs, you have no particular feeling. Your partner eats them all day, stuffs them oozing into his mouth like he’s starving. You march on beside him, era in, era out. You’ve gone pagan. He’s gone diabetic. You hand him bitter greens, dandelions, first blowing onetwothree for clocks, for wishes. You say, Eat This Now. The greens were never bitter, before. You refer to Before as though it were paradise. Friends laugh. They don’t understand that you’re speaking entirely without metaphor: Before, when we were in Paradise is really what you mean when you’re gnashing your teeth over radicchio and endive. They used to be so sweet, so sweet, so heart-breakingly sweet.

 7. You try to redefine your relationship.  There is no definition. You adjust your leaf for the last time, and then you leave.

8. He follows you, the apple-eater, the asshole.

9. You adjust your leaf and leave again. You leave for ten million years and he always follows you, saying my rib, you’re my rib and also singing, annoyingly, tie a yellow ribbon round the old fig tree, clutching at where his heart might be, had he a heart. Had he not lost you your paradise. You stand beneath a fig tree, and shake it. You cry I would have eaten you instead. I would have eaten you whole.

10. But you didn’t, he says, and laughs.

—-

I just found this, buried in an old file. I wrote it circa 2004, randomly, in someone else’s blog comments during a bored writer afternoon procrastination contest, the prompt for which was, I think, Eden. 

See also, The Wooden Eve