Are you giving me change again? (some mumbles) You're still sixty-two cents short so it's not enough. (more mumbles) You want me to take something back? Alright.
The customer's shaky, wrinkled hand reached into the unforgiving plastic bag at the end of the check out to remove one of the two bottles of soda that were in there. I fumbled in my own bag quicker and pulled out a dollar. Here, I said to the cashier, I've got it. The cashier smiled and asked You sure? before finishing up the soda purchase and moving on to my own restless fruit.
The tall, somewhat stooped black man with a few crooked teeth and a terrible habit of mumbling looked at me with round, sepia tinted eyes that had obviously seen a lot of not very beautiful things. His lips quivered and he nodded a thank you that I didn't do much to deserve and slouched away into a world as graceless as a cash register. I wondered who the second soda was for.
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In the beginning the Father created a place for man. A garden. Filled with trees and fruits and flowering plants and nourished by clear rivers it was a home that was pure and perfect. It abounded with beauty and was saturated with peace. A garden of exquisite detail and harmony. The Father was there with man and man interacted in utter freedom with the Father and all that was in the Father's garden. Sometimes the Father would scoop up a handful of dirt and make a living thing out of it and ask man what its name should be. Man would name it and it would fly, or crawl, or swim, or walk, or wander away. The Father didn't want man to ever be lonely so he put man to sleep and took out one of his ribs and made woman. When man woke and saw woman he knew that she was part of him and his heart beat in the rapture of completion.
They did not know guilt. The garden was theirs. It was the beginning.
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I walked with my plastic bag through some dingy automatic doors out into a dingier parking lot that was as gray and gravely as any I'd ever seen. Nothing about the dented metal shopping cart holders or the rows of dusty, tired looking cars bore any resemblance to a garden. But the sky was blue. I had almost forgotten to look.
