And Adam - A Short Story

The screeching bray of giraffes in the distance jolts me awake. 

"Long necked bastards," I mutter under my breath. 

Always when I wake, I need to spit. I raise myself out of our nestbed, careful to avoid waking Adam, and make enough distance so he won't hear my spitting.

Actually, there’s a particular bush I’ve been spitting behind for the last 4 days. I have the sense that if I keep spitting here in that same spot, something will grow there. I have to see this hypothesis through of course. And I guess it’s important to note, whatever rises out of the spot would basically be my spit child.

I recruit my throat and lungs together in a rising crescendo, and coax the thick sticky out, and onto the spot. I repeat the process a few times, until my gelatinous product lies on the yellow-brown earth in a small mound, victoriously. Today, the color is mostly white and clear, with a very thin green streak. Interesting.

I’ve never let Adam see this. Not for any particular reason, I don’t think. Mostly because I usually wake in the morning before him. But also, I think he might become jealous of the spit child I’m growing. Which, it is true, I am raising entirely without him.

I hear Adam awaken now with a soft, “Honey?”

Sidestepping a safe distance away from my secret spit-bush, “I’m just over here, my little pomegranate!”

No response, and after a few seconds, I hear his light snoring resume. He worked hard last night trying to catch that rabbit, so he definitely deserves his rest. Of course, he would deserve it much, much more if he had succeeded in making the catch. But it was apparent how hard he tried.

Regardless, finding breakfast will be up to me today. I’ve tried to explain to Adam how easy it is to just pick all these beautiful fruits. He goes on-and-on about hunting and the dominance of man over animal or something like that. But then, I’ve seen our chimpanzee neighbors eat better than us on most days, just plucking what grows.

In fact, I’ve made friends I think, with the woman-chimp who I call Chippie. Chippie doesn’t speak, not like us at least, but she seems to know a lot, and she’s taught me a great deal. She’s shown me all about some of the different fruits and leaves around here, and which ones are good and bad, just by pointing and squeaking. We first met when she peed on my head from up in a tree and then started hooting uncontrollably. I was able to nail her in the head with a good sized rock in response, and we’ve grown surprisingly close since. Chippie seems to really enjoy listening to me speak, despite how she can’t talk back. It seems to really get her hooting and jumping for some reason. And God knows I don’t have anyone else to talk to besides Adam.

Alas, I see no sign of Chippie this morning. I’ll be venturing alone into the jungle garden.

Lemons are the most plentiful around here, and not much else eats them. I go ahead and grab a bunch just in case I can't get anything good. An onion field is nearby and I snatch a few of those too. The pomegranate tree by the western pond is my real goal though. I sort of pretend like I’m perusing around different parts of the jungle and tasting a variety of plants and mushrooms like Chippie taught me; realistically I know the only thing that will satisfy, is pomegranates. My supposedly meandering path goes only to that particular tree. I love pomegranates.

From a distance now I see the pond and its quicksilver surface. Dragonflies skip across the water. Little dots of crimson reach my eyes from the tree on the far side. Even from this distance I can tell. I can tell they are almost bursting with blood-red honey-sweet juice. I already imagine breaking them open. They’ll resist at first. Then after a well placed stone, they’ll reveal their insides to me, and I’ll be chewing greedy mouthfuls of the stuff, pithe and all, while the juice runs down my chin and stains my whole front. 

But then there's a glimpse of movement in the water. Black and white shapes writhe and morph together in the ripples. Following the reflection upward, I see three of them. Zebras. 

“Striped bastards,” I mutter audibly.

I reach around and rip a lemon branch off a nearby tree for a weapon. The stripe horses are stupid enough that I can probably scare them off. Fortunately, they can’t reach the pomegranates, so those juicy beauties are safe up there, but if I get any down, I know from experience that they’re gonna be after me, and they are mean.

I explode towards them, screaming fear and anger. I’m trying my best to sound and look like that big ugly man-chimpanzee that Chippie sometimes hangs out with — hooting and screeching as ferociously as I can, even doing a mimicked leaping gallop towards them, my lemon-adorned warstick raised.

Two of them, the stupidest of the stupid I guess, instantly bolt off. But dammit, this last zebra is now counter-charging me. Time for a change of plan. I drop my branch, lemons, and onions; turn, and run. 

I run as fast as I can, and I know it’s not fast enough, but if I can just make it to the treeline…

The trampling sound quickly grows to become almost deafening. Disgustingly loud snorting and heaving sounds in my left ear indicate that, indeed, I’m not fast enough, and I’m about to get bitten, extremely hard. But I can’t look now. 

I do a quick stop foot-first slide, and something sharp wedges in my foot. The huge black and white beast careens past. No time to yell in pain, I scramble back to my feet and veer sharply east into the treeline.

We plunge into the shadow of the jungle, but the stupid stripe horse continues pursuing me, for much longer than necessary in my view, barking horribly the whole time with those weird zebra barks. Using the dense trees to my advantage, I managed to gain ground, a little at a time. Eventually the barking dies off, leaving only the hum of the jungle around me, with no zebras anywhere to be seen. 

“Striped BASTARD!” I scream — panting, shaking. 

My foot throbs, and stomach growls, reminding me on both counts what a failure this morning has been so far. I have no idea where I am, but the one silver lining (if you can call it that) is that I’ll be able to retrace my bloody steps easily enough. Hopping up to a fallen log, I pull up my foot and see the thorn. It’s embedded deep. Briefly I’m tempted to just walk home on it and get Adam to pull it out for me rather than deal with the surgery myself. Instead though, a part of my mind turns off for a second as I wrench the thorn loose, issuing a projectile blood squirt that briefly reminds me of pomegranates.

I begin to mutter something about the mental inadequacy of Zebras. But the words die in my throat as I realize the forest has gone completely silent - no birds, no wind, nor rustle of leaves. Looking around, everything has become perfectly still, except for one massive tree across from me that I hadn’t taken in yet. It seems to stretch up miles beyond the rest of the canopy.

Chippie hasn’t shown me this kind before. Its trunk is gnarled and twisted in a way that makes it look centuries older than anything else I’ve seen in the jungle. And the wood itself is… Alive. Undulating. As I look closer, the branches begin to swim like tentacles, each wielding silvergold leaves and iridescent flowers.

One of the branches unfurls towards me. Offering. At its tip hangs the largest fruit I’ve ever seen, seemingly made of pure white light. In the silence, for a second I can almost hear a soft singing, coming from the fruit itself. It twists slightly on its stem, beckoning me. My stomach growls again, loud.

My hand moves before my mind can catch up. The fruit is almost hot to the touch, its skin perfectly smooth. Then, it’s in my mouth, as my teeth rip off a warm chunk. 

An eruption of sensation begins. Suddenly I experience everything I’ve ever tasted at once – last week’s rabbit blood, the first pomegranate, Adam’s salty skin, fermented rot-lemons. Each flavor spirals into the next, and then I taste things I’ve never conceived of, but now somehow understand, like I’m tasting into the future: warm rich mothers-milk, metallic cold steel, pure-sweet sugar-candy, dark bitter coffee. The flavor of everything rests on my tongue, as I look down and see my hands age and young again in cycles, smoothing, wrinkling, and disintegrating repeatedly. Each finger sprouts its own tiny universe, complete with stars and worlds and stories written in my fingerprints.

Then I can hear the thoughts of worms in the soil, the dreams of seeds waiting to sprout, the memories of rocks untouched for millennia. I hear God, laughing. Laughing at me, with the dark terrible laugh of a bored child crushing ants for game. And Adam appears in my mind, sweet beautiful Adam with smile like the warm sun. I see him then, not as my companion, but as another branch of the same vast tree that connects all things. I see our future children, sprouting from every word, joke, and gesture we share, every fruit we eat, every step we take that breaks the soil and plants possibilities for the entire race that will follow us.

My hurt foot throbs, and I watch my blood seep into the ground. I can see through to the roots below, all interconnected, and connected to me. All one massive living thing stretching through the world. The zebras, the pomegranates, the chimps, the giraffes – we’re all flowers on the same plant. I suddenly understand why Chippie hoots when I talk: she's laughing at all the silly words we use, when everything that needs to be said is already hanging in the air all around us. The knowledge fills me like water, but I cannot hold it and it pours out. I understand everything and nothing. I see why the fruit was offered, why I took it, why I was always going to take it, why everything that ever happened, happened, and everything that will happen, will. But I couldn’t explain any of it.

Standing, weak, still holding the huge fruit, I blink away the tears and turn to limp back home on my trail of blood. If nothing else I found some breakfast for us.