The Garden by Lynda Cowles

Shortisted for the first Lunate 500 competition

“The play of light and shadow, and want and need, within this exceptional piece of writing provide a masterclass in sensuality and reader immersion. A classic tale retold with a modern sense of wonder and longing, The Garden showcases the human desire to live life to the fullest, no matter the cost. A deeply moving and evocative piece.”

Lunate editors

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It’s green in the garden. Deep green and cool; lush like nettles. Even on the hottest days, she can weave from one edge to the other and never feel the burning smudge of sun on her skin.

Adam likes the sun: he soaks it up as though he’s trying to become it. But Eve lingers beneath the trees, restlessly winding around the trunks as butterflies stalk her.

There is nothing to do here. She can eat, of course — apart from the obvious. There are other fruits: dates and figs, pomegranates and plums, sweet small oranges that stain her fingers with their juice. She picks at them idly, a distraction for a few moments, nothing more. She is never hungry.

Every now and then, she’ll coil down to the river; suffer the sun long enough to kneel in the water and cup a handful to her mouth. It is always clear. It is always cool but not cold. It is always enough to satisfy her. She is never thirsty.

Sometimes, at the river, he approaches. He sits beside her and traces lines in the dirt with his fingers. She stays longer those times, the water blessing her knees; feeling that he wants her to, knowing there is nothing left to say. She stays until the sun drives her back. There, waiting in the grass, she watches dark beetles seam the trees and wonders where they are going. Do they even know? Or do they, like her, move only as a cure for stillness?

It is this, finally, that delivers her to the apple. Not the snake. And not temptation, for how can she be tempted by fruit in a paradise full of fruit? Instead, it is boredom that beckons her in a slow, spiralling path to the tree in the centre of the garden. It is the bronze weight of the flat day that makes her reach up and snap the bright red fruit from its low branch. It is the silence that urges her to sink her teeth into the sharp, sour flesh.

She goes to him. Touches his hand and leads him into her shaded room of green. Places his hand on her stomach and kisses him, her mouth sticky and sweet, like the sap that pulses through the trees. She feels the moment when he tastes it: feels him stiffen with surprise. Then he falls into her and she into him. She has never been so hungry in all her life.