Skin - #AtoZChallenge

Eve slurped the juice off from around her mouth. This was a delicious kind of fruit! "Hey Adam! Come try this!" She could feel a tingling in her head. Not from the taste. She took another bite, to be sure. There was a surge inside her brain, she could feel it in her eyes. Something was changing.

As Adam approached, Eve turned her head curiously. He was the same Adam she knew, but somehow looked... different to her. What was it? Her mind seemed to have opened. Sparks were igniting inside. Dumbfounded at the sensations, she held out to Adam the fruit in her open red palm, still trying to make sense of what was happening. Every muscle, red. Veins in blue and red. Red. This was wrong. He was wrong.

He ate, and while he chewed, she watched the raw muscles of his face and jaw working. Muscles. He nodded in agreement that this was, indeed, delicious. Then his eyeballs brightened. Eyeballs. She watched the red, fibrous muscles of his neck move, repulsed. That one blue vein pulsed as he looked up into the trees. Veins. In the tree the serpent was twining his way among branches and vines. Adam was fascinated at the movement.

As Adam turned around on the garden with new eyes, seeing things afresh, Eve watched in horror. Why could she see their inner workings? She reached out as if to touch the stretchy, red, fibers of his torso, but he saw the movement and flinched back, as if seeing the naked bones, muscles and tendons of her hand for the first time.

"What have you done?" he asked. 

She pulled back her hand, feeling a strange, stinging moisture leaking from around her eyeballs onto the bones and muscles of her cheek. "I don't know. The serpent said..."

"You're naked!" he exclaimed. Looking at his own gesturing arm he added, "We're naked." He turned his hand over in front of his eyes. "This isn't right."

All she could do was nod. It was a mistake. 

He was quicker to action. "We shouldn't see this ugly, red, blood, fiber, muscle... quick, we need to cover it. Protect ourselves!"

They began pulling leaves off a nearby fig tree, and tied and stitched some of them together using grassy reeds from the riverside. They sat, back-to-back, working as fast as they could. Eve kept glancing back at Adam, embarrassed. He felt her shoulder twitch each time she moved, and refused to meet her eye. It was too grotesque!

A strong breeze moved through the trees behind them. The gentle voice of the maker came on the breeze. "Where are you?" 

They cringed behind the tree, for all the good it would do them. Adam's arm pressed against Eve's and she pushed him out from behind the tree. Suddenly, today, now, after all this time - the feel of his pulsing muscles in contact with her own revolted her. Caught off guard, Adam stammered, "Oh - I - uh, that is, we uh, hid. We're a bit - embarrassed. At being naked."

"Naked? Who told you that?" In no time, Adam had spilled the beans about Eve and the serpent. How she had eaten the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Their maker sighed in disappointment. It was his one rule: Don't eat from that tree. 

For a moment, Adam turned back to Eve, still hiding behind the tree. She saw something like hope in his eyes. The maker had been nothing but good and kind. Surely this would all work out. But when he spoke again, it was not in his usual gentle tones. He bellowed curses at the serpent, who promptly fell out of the tree and slithered away on his belly in accordance with the maker's words.

Eve sighed in relief. They were okay. It was really the serpent who erred. Then the maker turned to her and doled out curses on both her and Adam. She took comfort in the fact that they did not sound immediate. Certainly, she wouldn't feel the pains of child birth as quickly as that serpent was relegated to the ground. As soon as the curses were completed, all went black.

When Adam and Eve awoke, their muscles, veins, bones, everything, was covered with a thin membrane of some earthy, light brown color. When Eve turned her arm in amazement, examining this new garment of skin, she could see through it in some places to the blue veins within. She reached out to touch Adam, who didn't flinch. There were new sensations to explore through this strange skin garment. Maybe they would be okay.

Reference: The fall into sin is told in the book of   Genesis, chapter 3. In verse 21 we are told that God made "garments of skin" them. One time I read that and just wondered "what if they weren't actual garments made of animal skins?" What if the "garment of skin" was just... skin? What do you think? Fascinating? Gross? Too sacrilegious to think of?