And on the seventh day, He rolled over and lit a cigarette. He deserved it. He had been going at it for six days without stopping; a universal record still unchallenged. It had been good. The Book isn't lying about that. With a puckishly ethereal grin he murmured something to the effect of "Was it as good for Me as it was for Me?" Then, exhausted from all of His creating, His Divine Lust satiated, He snuggled up to Himself and drifted off to sleep. Had He been aware of the difficulties awaiting him as a single parent He may have slept fitfully; but as it was, He slept with infinite soundness.
He awoke with that gnawing feeling deep in His multiverse that He had forgotten something. He sat up, His all-seeing eyes wide and sorting through the infinite jumble; His omniscient mind racing, searching His eternal memories for the source of the nagging thing.
Then He remembered. His cigarette. He had sleepily thrust it into the center of one of his planets without making certain it was crushed out completely. "Oh My Gosh.", He thought, "Verily, verily I say unto Me, that planet hath surely burned to a crispness which surpasses all the woes to come!" Instantly He focused Himself around the precious little planet and sighed an almighty sigh of relief. The planet was still green and blue and throbbing with lives. And then, weary from His awesome stress, He laid down His vastly comforted head and went back to sleep, unaware that indeed a fire was raging.
The worms had been complaining for ages. They claimed that Earth was getting hotter; so hot in fact that they could no longer enter the unfathomably deep tunnels of their ancestors. They were ridiculed as doomsayers and worrywarts by their planetmates who would not accept such a lifestyle-disrupting hypothesis without scientific proof. To escape the growing heat, the worms engaged in a few evolutionary sorties as a surface species, but these subterranean refugees were never allowed to linger long on that sunlit shore between the inside an the out. Downtrodden, helpless and misunderstood, their slimy world becoming thinner and thinner, they darkly survived. And slowly, ever so slowly, some of the surface dwellers began to sense that something was afoot.
Satan was a dreamer, and was therefore usually unhappy. To a man like Satan happiness was a brief distraction, a sort of psychological masturbation, which for many becomes habitual. It was as if he had found something hidden, something greater than happiness or love and as big as everything. But no one could figure out exactly what it was he had found, and he was quite unable to explain it. It seemed that he was incapable of accepting the world as it was. It also seemed that he intended to change reality by shocking it into submission with the sheer audacity of his thoughts.
As his mother once recalled, "Satan was a strange little boy, quite unlike the others. When the other boys were out playing the usual boy games and making the usual boy noises, Satan was usually sitting under a big tree, thinking awfully big thoughts for such a scrawny tyke. Some times he would lie on his belly on the grass for hours, thinking. His father used to joke that it looked like he was talking to the worms."
Reality is laughing its guts out. It peeks around every doorway, stifling a hearty chortle with its wispy hand to its windy mouth. It pretends permanence all through the day, slapping our feet firmly as we walk, and then with a silent whoop it pulls the big spinning rug from under our feet when we lay down to sleep. Then it splashes dream stuff in our faces; lukewarm buckets of that liquid world which evaporates without even a hiss when we pry open our eyes in the morning.
KDO~1993
