52 53 THE CEDARVILLE REVIEW was. When Adam approached behind her, she flinched. Shuddered, wrapped an animalskin around her shoulders. She’d thought it was God coming to watch her work. Once, she would have shown it to Him proudly, but now she huddled around it, eyes down. Maybe Adam led his boys through a rocky canyon, and one of them made him laugh. And the laugh, a ringing he once knew, echoed around them. Adam dropped his torch, and his child picked it up for him. Handing it back, boy saw man’s hand trembling for the first time. How long does it take you to realize you’re listening for something that isn’t there? At least, not there the way it was before. - I wasn’t alive for 9/11. I have TikTok and AirPods and all the seasons of all the TV shows I could ever want. Quiet is hard to come by and I am complicit, never trying hard enough to find it. But I know how much colder my body feels when I slip out from under my weighted blanket. I know the unreleased tension in my arms when I wish I could have hugged someone a few seconds longer. It’s that sudden ache for something that’s no longer there. It’s the American high school experience. You get to know that one girl you’ve never had classes with before, and she stays home for community college and you scrounge for out-of-state scholarships and you leave. You were down. I don’t know what you listen to on a day like that. - God made noise when He walked in the garden. If I could ask them anything, I’d ask Adam and Eve if they missed the sound of His footsteps. The garden alone would have been a blessing. A rushing waterfall, a muted symphony sung by the wind passing through the leaves, dewy blades of grass squeaking as they folded under Adam and Eve’s feet. Animals introducing themselves as Adam called them by name. Birds teaching them to sing, the first human hums. The first laughs. Everything they would ever need, and everything they had ever known. But they had more than the garden: God walked alongside them. They could hear Him, not His voice only, but His movement through the world He’d given them. Was His presence constant, like white noise, always humming in the background? Until one day, like the power cutting out and the fan that helps you sleep powering down, they did wrong and the world was suddenly quiet. The story doesn’t say whether they received further instruction. Whether anything was ever the same again. Whether they could ask questions anymore. Whether they ever heard from Him again. Maybe, after the garden, Eve knelt over a basket she was weaving, one of the first baskets there ever
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