“Degenesis” by Jeff B Willey

What if Eve ate the Apple and didn’t tell Adam? Here is the truth: Eve was tempted by the snake and succumbed. She prodded Adam at first, tried to convince him to join her in tasting the succulent fruit of the Knowing Tree, to cure their blindness, to experience what there really was to be seen, heard, felt, touched. But to no avail.

Proud Adam, dumb Adam, dutiful attendant to the Creator, would not follow Eve, would not hear the serpent. He retreated to the garden.

“So be it,” whispered the snake. “The prize will be yours and yours alone.” Thus Eve feasted on the psychokinetic juices of the mysterious fruit, and was awakened to the true nature of the world. The snake left her to stumble around in wonderment.

She wandered about with nectar dripping from her chin, looking on things as if for the first time, contemplating. She experienced the revelation of her own mortality and realized that this awakening would end with her if she did not procreate. Off she went to hunt Adam.

Adam was found wading in a stream. Looking up at the approaching huntress he said, “There is a look in your eyes I have not seen before. What has befallen you, and where is the snake?”

Eve strode seductively up to First Man. “Sweet Adam, you do not see the snake when it quivers between your legs, right under your nose?” Her eyes gazed downward and she began to fondle Adam. “What are you doing?” he demanded. Though attempting an initial resistance Adam was soon conquered.

Having taken Adam’s seed, Eve retreated to the wilds. There she was greeted by the snake, who hissed, “Tell me what you’ve done.” After telling of her deed a noise rose up: the snake was growing, its skin peeling off to reveal rippling muscles. Eve shrunk in fear before the creature newly birthed: a great lion, who with a booming voice quaked, “It is I, your creator. You have sinned against me and my world.”

Eve was thus cast from the garden and forced to inhabit the grim hinterlands under a new name: Lilith. In time Lilith gave birth to twins. Meanwhile the creator had provided Adam with a second companion, a second Eve. Adam and his new mate lived leisurely and learned about the world at an unhurried pace, as originally intended, and differing from the all-at-once knowledge promised by the fruit of the Knowing Tree. Lessons would take the form of natural phenomena or come in the varied interactions of the garden’s creatures, while at other times the Creator manifested before his favorite children to give direct instruction.

Adam and second Eve met the invitation to procreate with vigor and their descendants populated the garden. But outside the garden, Lilith’s descendants had spread over the hinterlands. Lilith had given birth to Cain and Abel, sons of Adam, and she had also mated with Samael, a regent of the world who is known to some as the Grim Reaper, and raised this spawn. Rumors of a wicked race began to surface in the garden and war threatened between the two peoples. Come it did. Generations of bloodshed came to shape the course of history, and it is yet to finish. The lion watches and waits.