Eve tells Adam that it’s newness she collects. That she gathers gestures. “Cubs will nurse from any tiger too tired to object” is her proof. When she doesn’t get the response from him she wants, she says, “You never rub my feet anyway” and tells him, “Fine then, inhabit your own eternal summer.”

Somewhere in a den, Adam’s convinced she’s guilty as a stairwell. To think he once thought to himself, “Just because the tide is low doesn’t mean I’m any less in love.”

Now Adam’s sick of it. When Eve quips that Spring is a false promise, he’s too spent to question. He’s learned one form of green replaces another form of green replaces another.

“See, there’s a blueprint,” Eve says after dinner. “There will be a cat at the fall of man, and we can’t trust to the stars to adhere.” She was so self-absorbed; she couldn’t see him. Dreaming of shipwrecks.

“See,” Eve says after breakfast, “you don’t get it, that the mere sound of a because is enough.” Eve had been around longer than anyone ever thought. She saw the cosmic rays become the wail of newborn atoms. She was the first one to wonder why the silk of insects comes from their mouths, why dragonflies sew up the ears of the badly behaved, why a toad found on a full moon will grant wishes. Back then, Adam could barely breathe; it was like he was spiraling toward her. Back then, Adam used to think about how much he liked it when her seaweed got damp. Back then, Eve could hold her hand out in the rain to make it stop.

Turns out, she was writing a book before it happened. The dedication page read: “To Adam: My favorite invertebrate.” Then, because she was bored or annoyed that he hadn’t asked her about her day, Eve said “Let’s accelerate toward new beginnings, near noises swallowed.”

And when it happened, she wept. All she could say was, “We didn’t know it was a song. We didn’t know it was a song.” And Adam, who was mostly silent in the crisis of our fate, said only in response, “From everything a little remains.”