Bathroom Monologue: Apples for Science

“If Satan can do this, so can I,” Jesus muttered, struggling into the snakeskin. It was a lovely skin; if anyone looked closely they would see its diamondback pattern was actually a series of slanted crosses. No one did look closely, though, because he was unknowable to look at it. It was part of the job.

When he finished putting it on, the Jesus-snake slithered over to a lonely apple tree. Careful not to disturb the daydreaming mathematician below it, the Jesus-snake climbed up the trunk. He ascended to an overhanging limb, flicking his tongue at the apples not so much to smell which one was right (he was omniscient; he knew exactly which apple to drop), as he did out of a sense of theatre.

There was a ripe red one just above the mathematician’s head. The Jesus-snake reached down and bit its stem. It broke quietly, and the fruit fell freely.

An instant later, Isaac Newton cried in pain. He whirled on the offending apple, dumbly furious for a moment. Then he picked it up. Then he looked up. He didn’t see the serpent because he was looking for something else that was invisible. His eyes went frantic and he gestured with his hands, moving a fist in relation to the apple and the ground.

The Jesus-snake slithered out of the tree and into the air, flying upwards. Satan appeared moments later. He was in the guise of a certain species of eagle that eats snakes.

“You know, Newton was never hit by an apple,” he said. “That story isn’t real.”

The Jesus-snake disregarded both his form and his criticism.

“Neither is this one.”

He disappeared in a cloud of realism. The Satan-eagle circled for a while, perplexed. He sniffed and used the angelic sense, utterly unable to tell where his nemesis had gone.

Meanwhile, in another timeline that never happened, a suspicious looking handyman entered Archimedes’s house and tinkered with the bathtub.