“I mean, take Eve, for instance. Whether you see the story as literal history, religious metaphor, or just plain un-truth, you’ve got to note this incredible omission that’s been made. How the hell did she come to understand what just happened to her? She’s not a baby, she’s a grown woman who just…spawned, like, fully aware. How would you respond to Existence slapping you full in the face, you know, intellectually? Nobody explains much to her. Hello Eve, welcome to the world, you were up until recently a rib in another person’s body. That makes no sense; she doesn’t even know what the hell a rib is, does she? That’s about all they tell her and then she’s supposed to be satisfied with that. Or do they even tell her that much? I don’t know, I haven’t actually read the Bible. Hey, do you think Adam asked God to use a rib so he’d be able to — okay, fine, I won’t finish that thought in public. Anyway,  if I’d have been there I’d tell her, hi Eve, you’re now a whole person with a brain of your own. Congratulations! Sentience is fabulously interesting. But you’re considered useful mainly for that womb you have that God for some reason didn’t see fit to bestow upon Human 1.0, and you’re soon to eat something and start your legacy of being painted as the doom of mankind so that men can justify treating you like an object, existing solely to carry that womb as your regrettable biological punishment, and they will tell you that despite the fact that it’s in your body it exists for their use. They want to own it, for its Godlike powers of creation, and lie because they hate the fact that they don’t. A lot of men try too hard to be God; more than women, I think, because we always sort of have been. They can only imagine being capable of creating new conscious life basically ex nihilo, but we can just…do that, after making the few necessary arrangements. Loads of pastors love to brag that humans are the best and most advanced thing their God ever created, but neglect to also credit the millions of people performing the miracle of making new ones every day. Utero-envy is more real than penis-envy ever was, just let me tell you that. But sadly a very long stretch of history will pass in which you’re gonna be a vending machine to them, Eve, in the sense that something will be inserted into you and you will be expected to spit something back out in exchange, and if you try to keep it for yourself you will be banged on until you drop it. And if you behave like that too often, denying men the things they think they have a right to, you will be considered broken, a bit too odd for comfort, and they will say that something will have to be done about that. And if you also do other discomfiting things like try to pursue your ideas in a direction they don’t like they’ll say hey now, don’t you go taking that too far, look what happened the last time we let you women make wholly independent decisions. We damn well lost Paradise. You never had it, fuckin’…Dave from Tucson, Arizona, but their point is, we can’t trust you. That only seems fair to me, cause we already know better than to trust our opposite sex. Catch up. But they say that like paradise was a one-time, invaluable, irreplaceable thing we broke and not something we could all actually have if we just pulled our acts together. We’re smart enough to figure a way to make it, I think, and powerful enough. Too many people are just convinced that everything is already so bad and we’re still alive, still kicking, violently, so clearly it’s not all that urgent and there’s no point in making the effort to change right now. It’s like finding out that every time you flush a shit, imperceptible little particles of poop-water are sprayed up and spread out across every corner of your innocently white bathroom, and thinking about the fact that you and your kids and half the bloody planet store your toothbrushes in there, and then trying very hard to stop thinking about what that means. Cause do we stop keeping our toothbrushes in little cups by the bathroom sink once we know? Of course not. You can’t see the particles anyway, so just forget about it. What was I saying before? Right, yeah, so that’s why I genuinely do eat an apple a day. My toast to Eve. Reminds me that women making wholly independent decisions tastes pretty damn good, actually, and I should do it as much as possible just to shove the fact that I can up their noses until they get it. Even if I do feel like the world ends every time I get something wrong. Yeah no, it was never to avoid seeing the doctor, don’t be ridiculous. I have great insurance, and she’s a wonderful lady.”

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Louise van Oel (she/her) is a student of English, history, and professional writing at Concordia University in Montreal. She was part of pixie literary magazine's inaugural group of editors, and is now a web content creator for Soliloquies Anthology. Some of her earlier prose work can be found in the above two publications, and is forthcoming from the University of Western Ontario's arts journal Word Hoard. While she has the use of your eyeballs, she'd also like to use this space to say: hi :)