Why Eve was cropped out from the left of Adam, I had no clue. I set my apple by my side on the pews and took a long look at the oil-painted apple in Eve’s hand. It was the only item that represented her presence within the altar frame, looking at once discolored and sinewy like a breast. Our priest had said the artwork was commissioned by a renowned male merchant of its time, which made sense. A man could do anything with a woman in those days, he told us then—paint her, marry her, crop her, you name it.
Listening to him, I thought back on my Adam and how I, like Eve, was cut out of the frame of his life overnight. If I got the priest’s words right, my loneliness was most likely set in motion by another big angry male held in high regard in the world of men, Satan, but maybe this time it was God who failed me. One day Adam and I were getting along at a level unmatched by anyone else in my life, and the next thing I knew, he was being unresponsive to my sixteenth text message straight. I imagined his spidery fingers hovering over his phone all night, at once touching and not touching it like the soft spots of my body. It was those hands that I had first noticed about him, with which he greeted me into his life and then didn’t let go until the day he ghosted me.
In the weeks that followed, I wept and wept. In the Old Testament, Gargantua was said to have cried for three months, seven days, thirteen hours, and forty-seven minutes to give birth to a river. Could it be the same river now standing in front of my eyes, parting the land between the oil-painted Adam and partially present Eve? “Each mortal,” our priest once told us, “has an equal right to the use of his or her land and the water in it.” But if that were really the case, then why aren’t the Eves of this world entitled to their share of the land of men? Why were we deemed secondary to almost anything, an afterthought?
One Sunday, long after our breakup, I spotted Adam at church. He was sitting with his big sister in one of the front pews, switching between smiles and scowls every few minutes. After the sermon had ended, he found me in the courtyard to say hi. When we shook hands, an electric current traveled across the blackest guts of my body, making me shudder as if we’d never broken up. I felt dirty, sinful again, as if I were the only person in the whole congregation who renounced her share of wine and sacramental bread. With the way he looked at me, all thoughts of decency fled out the window. Just in case you were wondering, I wasn’t doing anything to make his dog bark. Thanks to my aligning stars, I’d dyed my hair back to its natural color just the day before, so I felt fairly confident about myself, my looks, and that, I guess, did half the job. When he asked me if I would care to enjoy a coffee with him, I blushed. “We don’t even have to do it,” he said, “if you don’t want to.” A lot of things happened to me that I didn’t want since our breakup, I wanted to tell him but kept my mouth shut, as always. I just wondered how much of our time together he remembered, if at all. I wondered if he missed me.
To my disappointment, the cafe of his choice was teeming with drunk men. Nothing about the place looked particularly godly, and the lighting was poor or representative of some recent hype I wasn’t familiar with. We picked the corner farthest from the bar and drank peppermint schnapps, his favorite. He joked about his dwindling pay slips while I told him about my sister and how she was offered this fancy college scholarship before accidentally getting knocked up by a Lutheran computer scientist and ending up getting married. Adam nodded the whole time and wore his handsome smile at all the odd moments. If there was an undercurrent of tension in the air, I sure hoped I wasn’t making it up.
Just when I thought Adam would reach over to hold my hand, he got up and said that he needed to hit the toilet. I couldn’t decide by the way he looked at me whether this was a fact or another one of his naughty propositions. I watched him disappear into the dim hallway to make sure, and then decided to follow him.
Adam was whistling a tune from my childhood in one of the cabins when I stepped into the men’s room. He didn’t take notice of my entry or thought maybe I was some other dude. I walked toward his cabin in slow steps and stopped right at the brink. That was when he stopped singing and I felt the first pump of adrenaline rushing through my veins. I pressed my fingertips against the swing door but didn’t immediately give it a push. First I tried to imagine what would happen if I did. I thought about all the women in my life for a moment—my mom, my sister, Gargantua, friends. I found comfort in the mental image of Eve as if she were my avatar, my spirit animal. I don’t know what got into me at that moment and made me do all those things that followed. Maybe it was Satan that indeed made me, maybe not. Our priest would later ask me what I meant by it all in the confessional box. A woman can do anything she pleases with men these days, I replied—paint him, marry him, crop him, you name it.
Sarp Sozdinler is a Turkish writer based between New York and Amsterdam. He has been featured or is forthcoming on X-R-A-Y, No Contact, Solstice, Passages North, The Offing, and elsewhere. Some of his longer pieces have been selected as a finalist at literary contests, including the Waasnode Short Fiction Prize judged by Jonathan Escoffery.
Photo by CottonBro