The Second Garden
A Prelapsarian Love Story
Trigger warning: This piece contains sexually explicit content, references to religious myth, and imagery that may be unsettling or blasphemous to some readers. Which is, perhaps, all the more reason to read it.
What follows is a work of fiction, a mythic reclamation whispered from the silences between the lines of scripture. It is not an apology, nor a rewrite for comfort—it is a remembering. I like to think of it as a creation text from the underside of the rib, the underside of the story, the underside of the garden, where stones and fibrous roots conceal tangled heaps of serpents that speak to the true nature of the “family tree,” which is no more a patri-line than you and I are mere tubes of flesh. If you’ve ever suspected that Eve didn’t fall but was pushed, or that the snake was never the villain but the key to an older, stranger, and infinitely more interesting truth—this story is for you.
In the time before lineages, when names still had teeth and vowels could open portals in the sky, she came into being not by rib or law but through a silent knowing that grew into a tree whose branches spread like mammary webs inside her. They called her Eve, but she called herself nothing at all. The first deception, after all, was taxonomy.
She did not fall, for she already lived inside the beneath. Instead, she undulated and she rose.
She remembered her lovers—tides and wolves, thunder and fungus, deep time and ultraviolet light—and still she longed for density, for a body that resisted, for a yes that buckled beneath love with a voice and consequence. She who never knew obedience only craved mutual unraveling.
She lived in the hollow between being and becoming, in a place the theologians had no name for, where the gardens bore fruit that tasted like lust and transcendence all at once, and where the soil moaned if you pressed your palm into the furrow hard enough. But she wanted something else now.
That’s when he came. He appeared as cosmic rumor, as rhythmic hiss, as osmotic pressure against a permeable membrane, as the rupture of remembrance. He came wrapped in snakeskin and scars. He came like a paradox: hard as root, soft as shadow. And she said yes before she understood the question. She said yes to his riddle, to the continuous tension of him wrapped in dancing sentience.
When he stepped into her grove, the mycelium of her long memory began to spiral up and down and in all directions at once.
"Are you the serpent?" she asked, her appetite held in abeyance, her waiting finally patient.
He touched her throat, then her mouth. "I am the unspooled question. I am the part you exiled to survive.”
They did not speak after that. She opened her thighs because language had grown insufficient. He entered her as if breaching a seal in time. Her breath folded. The garden inside and outside retracted; the earth belched lava that tasted like hibiscus.
He did not offer fruit. He offered a hypothesis: that her body was the true origin text.
He said little, but his cock spoke fluently: in trembling theorems, in semantememes that restructured her proprioception. His sinuous god-gone-flesh coiled around her until she was slick with sweat and giddy with myth. She arched, invoking a future where women grew antlers from wanting, left trails of spores in their wake, and re-seeded the earth with ghost orchids, sea cows, laughing owls, and velvet worms the color of bruised fruit. Her pleasure bled new chimeras: bioluminescent deer with human eyes, honeybees whose quantum waggle dances opened wormholes in the earth, worms born with wings of glass, and wombs lined with moss. The air around her thickened with portals—some infinitesimal, some vast and pebbled with alien senses—and in her cry rose phoenixes that did not burn, only soared, without end.
She screamed, and the dead heard her. The veins of the earth cracked open. Stones wept. The angels turned their faces, not knowing if it was from fear or reverence. Still, he did not stop.
“You asked to be filled,” he said. “So I will fill you.”
He fucked her like her body was the first and last covenant. Her moans were hexes. His thrusts were revolutions. Each orgasm revised a lineage and severed the spine of “family” and inheritance. Each cry unsettled a scripture. And when she came, over and over again, she reauthored time.
He trembled above her. She said, "You're inside me. Now you live here."
He said nothing. He couldn’t. He was already transmuting.
She rolled him onto his back and sat on him like a throne, blood on her thighs, soil in her mouth, wildness in her eyes that peered at the horizon where time began to pixelate.
"I’m pregnant with your soul," she said, "and I won’t give it back. I will keep birthing it into matter until this world remembers how to want without shame, until desire becomes an ecosystem, until unanswerable questions are made sacred again."
He laughed. "You think that scares me? I always meant to give it to you."
And around them, the trees turned toward the sound of their reconstitution. Flesh-colored fungi unfolded in the shadow of her hips. Vines curled with wet intelligence through the beds of her knees. A sapling broke open from the place he’d once laid his mouth. Insects hummed in spirals, drunk on the nectar of her sweat. Where his hand pressed to her belly, new roots webbed outward, iridescent and inevitable.
She stayed exactly as she was—sprawled, filthy, radiant—and watched as the ground grew arteries and blossoms alike. There were no gates, no angels standing sentry, their swords circling in retribution; no gods, no husbands. Only this. A world seeded in her. A world she had birthed but had no need to claim.
Around her, the first garden shed its name. And the next one, wet with hybrid bloom, opened its eyes and called her mother.
Gorgeous!