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To have felt always what I did in that moment.
    Eventually I came to the natural terraces of the vineyard. I was breathless, my heart thudding in my ears, the blood in my veins drumming its pulsing song. I plucked my way between the woody, untrained vines, stumped like shrubs—only recently had the adam and I talked of pruning back their shoots—fingering the tooth-edged leaves, plucking idly at grapes the size of plums. I ate hungrily, thirstily, before dropping into a shaded patch of grass, my forearm over my eyes. Sated with the sugar of the grapes, elated from my run, ecstatic from the presence of the One—I drifted to sleep.
    When I woke, the sun was in my eyes. No, it was too late in the day for that. I rolled over and found that the brightness nearby was not the sun at all, but its light reflected on gleaming scales.
    The serpent watched me with a glittering eye.
    How beautiful you are, daughter of God and man. Though the other animals made plain their pleasure or curiosity or intent, none of them ever spoke so elegantly to my inner ear as he. How strange he was, with that aged sense of spirit possessed by none of the others.
    And you. In my euphoria and now in my languor, every-thing was beautiful, even more so than normal. I found myself wanting to touch him.
    Ah, bliss, he said, standing just outside my reach. How I knew it, once. It came, so faintly: an unspoken exhalation. I knew then that he understood the thing still ebbing like opiate from my veins.
    His eye roved over me, watching me as though from a distance and not mere inches away.
    How lovely is rapture on you, daughter of man and God.
    I sighed. How lovely is the rapture of the One that Is.
    You were beautiful even without it. And how intelligent you are! You make yourself over by your search for understanding. By your discoveries, you are daily a new creature. All creation bows down before you. He inclined his head. He would have gone away then, I knew, except that I said aloud after him, “It is because of the One that Is. What am I on my own or you on your own, without the One, after all?”
    The serpent’s back stiffened, and it returned its obsidian eye to me.
    Indeed, what are you but a part of the adam, and he, a particle of mud? But— he drew closer now. Lying on the ground as I was, he towered over me, as large as a wolf. You became more the moment you demanded to know. When you first lifted your face to the heavens and determined to ascend to understanding. You are more like the One that Is than you realize.
    Had I the eyes to see it, I might have noted the moue of distaste. I might have seen the turn of his head as he bowed it. But at the time I was only confounded by his logic, which seemed one moment as opaque as the mists—and in the next as bright as the sun the moment they cleared.
    That afternoon when I went down from the terraces, I called the fallow doe, Adah. She pricked her head and came at a gait and together we ran for the river. We plunged full-long into the water and swam so far that we began to drift, Adah, legs churning, I on my back. My hair splayed beneath the glassy surface of the water as I gazed, unflinching, into the sun, thinking of all that the serpent had said.
    After a while, Adah picked her way onto the bank. But I drifted until the reeds caught me, until the plop of frogs in the shallows tickled my ears, and I looked up to find the adam crouched at the edge of the water, smiling at me.
    He waded in among the reeds and gathered me to him. “How smooth and high your cheek. How strong your legs. How graceful your back. Ask of me anything. Ask of the One that Is anything. Who can deny you?”
    That day when he kissed me, I had two loves: one given to hold me and one to woo my soul.
    Surely I was the most beautiful creature on earth.
     
     
    LATE THAT NIGHT, AFTER the insects had come out to take up their chorus by light of the waning moon, I wondered what it must have been to be alone.
    I imagined what it was to