She knows as much of the story as all women know,
or will know in time. Eve, of course, never found it out. After all,
it was just her and the man in the garden: tomatoes, warm skin
and no best girlfriend to insinuate between them.
She understands a man's role in this, his epic
cliché: temptation, the infraction made, apple ecstatically
devoured while early frost hoars the ground. Less so her friend's:
the proffered flesh, skin peeled down to brittle bone. False
myth of locker bays, 11th grade: magnetic mirrors, sharp
silver bracelets on bare arms. Lunch hour girlfight: dirty, fast
like a switchblade stab, cut straight up to bloody core.
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