rib
a rib is a rib is a woman is a rib
In the wasteland, Eve dreams for the first time. She dreams of Adam, standing in a field of clover, and of God as a towering tree, limbs outstretched forever, latticed against the blue sky, embracing the whole garden.
“God has created thee, and God shall banish all wickedness from thee, as all of you is of God. All of ‘you’ is of me.”
Adam bows his head and steeples his fingers, and God sways his branch arms on a breeze, and Eve wonders where she is in all of this. Wonders if this was the moment it all slipped through her fingers, like Adam’s shins slipping through the clover, like God slipping his arms through the white clouds.
(Eve wonders where the roots of malice first took hold if not the garden. Wonders who tended them if not God.)
…
In the garden, what are Adam and Eve but what they are made of?
“All of ‘you’ is of me. All of ‘you’ is of me. All of ‘you’ is of-“
“What are we?” wonders Eve. Quiet, contemplative, curious in that calm way, like wading through still water, like watching leaves fall in the breeze, like the branched hands of God weaving through the pale sky. “What are we, if we are made of God?”
“You are made from my rib,” Adam said. Adam knows his rib when he sees it. Adam remembers God placing it in the dirt. He remembers how it made Eve.
“What is a rib?” Eve ponders. She asks the air, she asks God, she asks Adam.
“A part of me I can live without,” says Adam. “A part of me sacrificed for you .” His hand grazes the skin of his side. Remembers it.
How many ribs does it take to make a woman?
“I am a rib,” Eve says to the wind, “A part of you that can live without you. A part of you that grows.”
“What is to grow?” Adam asks Eve. He watches her face. This word concerns him. He has not said it before. It does not taste right in his mouth.
Eve weaves her arms into the air above her head. She tries to feel the clouds, like God. She tries to be the air between her fingers.
“God says you are part of me, are from me,” Adam tells her. “God says you are dirt and my bones.”
“God made you for a rib and you did not realize.” Eve ripples her fingers in the rays of light that peak around the clouds. She rolls her wrist. She feels the clover crowding at her ankles. Her feet shift through it. “God steals no part of me.”
Eve has five fingers on each hand and two feet and twin eyes and a tongue with which to pray and knees with which to kneel and how many ribs does it take to make a woman? How many ribs does it take to make a woman listen? To make a woman pray?
How many ribs does it take to make a woman?
“What is a rib?” Adam asks God.
“I am,” answers Eve.
…
In the wasteland, Eve thinks of Eden and the wisteria, drunk on the weight of itself. She thinks of it’s heavy, purple-dappled branches, bowing down to earth, dipping like long arms come to hold her. Thinks of their swaying. Thinks of knowing what it is to be that kind of limber, that kind of wind-swept, this kind of remembered.
Eve can’t stop the cry that breaks from her chest, can’t help but bite into the meaty flesh of her palm, bite and bite around her wail. She buckles at the waist, bows like those branches, screams that way wind does through the trees in the wasteland.
Only when she tastes the swell of her blood on her tongue does she let go, straighten herself again. She does not know the word for vampire, nor for communion, but blood is blood. Blood is enough.
She does not know that Cain will kill Abel and she will still love him. She does not know that Abel is a man and Cain is a rib. She does not know that a rib is another word for a snake, for a breaking thing. She does not know how many ribs it takes to make a woman. That it takes just one more to make her son. Just one to kill him.
…
I have loved something that doesn't really exist.
I've loved a rib bone, caked in dirt, dressed as a man, up on two legs, only so it can kneel, only so it can beg, only so it can learn to say “thank you” and call it prayer.
I have loved a garden that does not wait for me, a garden that breeds snakes, that blames me for their venom, a garden that knows me only as a rib.
I have loved a garden where I am rib, not woman. Where I am companion, not wife. I have loved a man when I am a rib. I have never been a rib, but I have loved that space behind my own, I can count them with my fingers, under my skin, cannot remember how many I should have, only know how many I am. If I have what I am told I am (a rib a rib a rib), then what have I loved?
I have loved something that does not know I have grown. I have loved something that loved me when I was dirt and a rib, that did not know what I would become.
Adam gives a rib to make a wife.
Eve has ribs but does not need them to make sons, gives it to them anyways.
(If God had wanted Eve to pray, he should have used a kneecap.)
…
Eve dreams, for the first time, in the wasteland (of a snake being pulled from Adam’s stomach and solidifying to bone in the dirt) that Adam loves her. Eve dreams (she is all this evil) of God’s favor.
…
Adam rubs the sore ache of his left side, where his stomach hollows too abruptly. Where there is just enough space to nestle the loss of something he does not remember ever having. Like love. Like a garden. Like God.
…
Eve is on all fours in the garden, her fingernails too long, all ragged and broken off, or else stubbed out. She digs like if she can just bury this dirt under those broken nails, she'll have a way to remember. Then, when someone finds her, they'll know where she was, where she came from. When God comes to find her, she can show him what she is. She can make him remember. She digs, and she digs, and she digs.
Eve heaves heavy fistfuls of dirt and grass into her mouth, works them through her teeth, down her throat. If an apple can teach her everything else, maybe the dirt of the garden can teach her how to love God again. Maybe the grass can teach her how to obey. It all just tastes like soil and green, soil and green. With an apple in the back of her throat, Eve knows the word for irony. With an apple in the back of her throat, Eve knows the taste of blood, knows this doesn't taste like hers, knows she is made of a rib and this dirt, and that it doesn't taste like her anymore. Maybe if she shoved it down the throat of God, he would remember how to love her.
Maybe he would remember that he made her, and the apple, and the snake. Maybe with a hand down his throat, God would know what a woman is. Her fistfuls become fists, her grabbing becomes pounding.
Eve is on all fours, pounding her fists into the dirt of the garden, searching for the rib that made her so she can break it.
…
In the wasteland, Eve's eldest son cracks a rock over the skull of his brother. Her youngest son's blood dries on a stone in the palm of her firstborn. In the wasteland, Eve knows what it is to mourn both of these things. She knows what it is to lose two sons in that moment. With an apple in her throat, Eve knows that love and hate can war in your heart, knows there is no winner.
This is the closest Eve will ever feel to knowing God - in the wasteland, with a body cradled in one arm, and a rock held in the other. With a body at her feet, and blood dripping from her palm. With an arm wrapped around the shoulders of a vengeful son, of a brother. Eve knows it can be both.
In the garden, is Eve the rock, or the body? Does God know she can be both? She can break the rib. She is the sharp edge, the interrupted curve, she is the fallen shard.
Where is Adam when the rock falls? Where is Adam when his son hits his knees, dying like in prayer? Where is Adam when the fruit ripens on the vine, when she pierces it with her teeth? When it drips in her palm, like a rock dripping blood?
…
One day, Cain will ask Eve why they call God their shepherd and not their gardener, not their farmer, and Eve will tell him that to shepherd is to lead, but to garden is to tend, and God is no longer tender. God has learned the hard way that all gardens yield flowers, but also weeds. God does not take after gardens any longer. It did not suit him.
Able knows that sheep follow, that sheep listen. Able knows what God knows: that sheep are where you lead them. That sheep are what you see in their eyes. Sheep do not hide roots. Sheep do not sow their own seeds. Able knows God, just like Cain knows the weight of a rock in a palm. Just like Adam knows the pain of a rib. Just like Eve knows the sweet, tart finish of an apple.
…
(What does it feel like to shine between everything?)
…
In the wasteland, Eve dreams her body is a barren plot of untended dirt. And her God is a rabid dog, toting the bone of some slayed beast, and it drops this bone, a rib, into the stomach of her soil. A sun that looks like Adam, that has a name with the same cadence, bakes it slowly. Lovingly, almost. Bakes it until it is dried and cracked and fossilized. In the wasteland, Eve dreams that her soul is a garden, all splendor and ruin and whimsy and cruelty. Eve dreams that flowers grow from the remnants of bone fragments. Eve dreams there is a palm grasped in hers. Pressed between them: ripe skin peeled from the fruit, the sunburned skin of a shoulder, seeping blood, blossoming between their entwined fingers like poppy. In the wasteland, Eve dreams that Cain brought the sun down for her, that Cain made evening, made night. In the wasteland, she misses the sun. She dreams of a sudden chill, of a dark sky, of a million stars. Of constellations in the shape of a father's face. She does not recognize it.
…
Adam does not let his sons eat from the apple trees. He has not tasted the white flesh since the garden. Adam knows a word called "allergy," and he uses it. The commandment from Adam is "cannot," never "shall not."
In this way, the forbidden fruit lives in the wasteland, too. In this way, Eve knows it all can be more gentle. In this way, Eve knows that "dangerous" and "deadly" can take away the stinging temptation of choice.
In this way, Eve slips through the garden in shadow. In this way, she sits beneath the apple tree in the dark, under the night that God never taught her, that she pulled down for herself, when the sun goes to be with the lord, which is to be away from her. Here she palms the tender fruit, sometimes glossy red, sometimes hazy green, sometimes firm, sometimes fallen and soft, like her. In this way, she is in the garden for that brief moment, before she bit into flesh, before it all ran down her chin.
"Is this not what you taught me?" She would like to ask God, if he still listened. "To eat what is made flesh, for you? Are we not the same?"
From under the apple tree, Eve thinks they must be. In this way, she thinks they must be.
creative license!!! creative license!!!!
This is raw and hardly edited and something that has been beating against the inside of my chest for a while, eating its way through my tender parts.
Too many little stars of inspiration to aptly recount, but these ones have their claws in deep:
- aspen kae 🌸🕊️ of Weeping Cherry Poetry, from her April Writing Prompts: “…like wisteria, drunk on the weight of itself.” Probably the first line of this that came to me. Thank you for planting that seed.
- This beautiful human who’s name I don’t even know - @user68519586 on instagram. Their poetry changes me. I’m not sure this will ever find them. If it does, well damn.
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck. Over and over and over.
- “Batter Up” by Brand New, played live at a stage in Nashville, TN, and on the stereo in my car, and in the living room while I write this, and in my mind when I dream.