(STANG NOTE: Does anybody know who wrote this??)
Adam and Eve -- the historical Adam and Eve, not the Biblical Adam and Eve -- had been cast out of their Edenic homeland... not by God, but by their family, apish prehumans who considered them hideous mutants.
They also considered Adam the biggest jerk in the history of their tribe. It wasn't that he was as ugly as Eve, with her high, browless forehead, jutting chin, and freakish posture and height. Aside from his hairlessness and coloration, he resembled his stooped relatives. Rather, he was detested as a pussy-whipped, gullible, craven cuckold, a walking public humiliation. Either he was incredibly stupid, or he had powers of self-delusion and cowardice unimaginable to their limited minds.
For, while he continued to call himself the father of Eve's four mutant children, everyone else knew that Eve's real lover was the demon or god who appeared each Spring from nowhere. He would first shed his skin, an act that made his furry, naked audience grit their teeth in horror, and expose a penis that, compared to theirs, resembled a python holding an apple in its mouth. The fiend would then gently mount the strangely unafraid Eve, huffing and puffing upon her as well as through the smoking stick he held clenched between grinning demon-teeth. Then the stranger would disappear, always just before Adam returned from a usually fruitless hunting trip. When the tribe jeered at him, he called them liars or at least pretended not to believe.
The stranger had appeared for only four consecutive springs. A few years later the Adam and Eve family had been ostracized from the Community of Pre-Man, who had by then ceased to fear the stranger's possible return and anger at them for ridding themselves of the accursed, deformed clan.
But Adam wondered, such as he could, while he sat watching Eve and the children around their lonely campfire. She was teaching them how to use flint to start their own fires, a trick neither their erstwhile relatives nor Adam seemed able to master. He looked at their four different shades of coloration and their slightly different faces. One tan, one reddish brown, on very dark brown, one a kind of brownish olive. One each of the first prototypical European, Native American, African, and Asian female.
Adam considered, after his fashion, Eve's light blue hair and forest-green skin. He looked at his own blotchy pink skin -- quite unlike that of Eve's lightest colored child, indeed more akin to the painful pink of a badly sunburned albino. And, for the first time, he was somehow enabled to think to himself, "Maybe the tribe was right."
And with that, with his first experience of the emotions of shame and self-recrimination -- at, in fact, the birth of what we today call all human guilt -- Adam began also for the first time to SCHEME. If even Eve, the ugliest member of his tribe, would not beget children by him, maybe there might be someone else in the immediate vicinity who someday WOULD.
But he'd have to make 'em learn to keep their mouths shut about it.
And with that thought, Adam laughed his very first laugh. Eve and the children looked up at the ugly sound... and for their very first times, without realizing it, they knew fear of the unknown.
Original file name: Adam and Eve
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