In botany, a pome (after the Latin name for fruit: pomum) is a type of fruit produced by flowering plants in the subfamily Maloideae of the family Rosaceae.(from wiki)
Today at the Science Creative Quarterly we have this great story written by Matt McKenna.
For those of you unfamiliar with the SCQ, it's sort of a science web publication whose most mentioned comparison is the McSweeney's website (not a bad thing to be compared to, and to be honest, I quite like the site having the label, "McSweeney's for Sciencegeeks.")
Anyway, the SCQ has actually been on a bit of a pseudo hiatus this last year, since I'm sort of the head editor and was especially busy these past 9 or so months. So, it's always a treat for me when we have some new material to present - like the piece today.
It's curious, because since the SCQ also caters to the school community, I was initially a little hesitant in publishing today's piece. Still, admittedly, today's story is the sort of stuff I'd like to see more of, so do send on your work if you have any (SCQ's submissions guide can be viewed here).
In any event, I'll reprint Matt's piece for you here to enjoy (the rest below the fold):
Adam and Eve, naked and not smart, sat somewhere in the Garden of Eden.
A snake slithered afoot. It said, "Tss, come gorge yourselves upon the forbidden fruit and escape from your self-incarceration in the prison of ignorance."
Adam and Eve looked at each other, shrugged, and started having sex.
The snake shook its head and took a pair of quick bites from Adam's and Eve's ass cheeks.
"Yow!" they yelled.
The couple quickly grew afraid and looked upon the snake much the same way they looked upon God.
The snake said, "Tss, tss, follow me."
The snake snaked its way to the Tree. It stopped in front of the trunk, perched upon the end of its tail and stared at Adam and Eve through the dark universe of its black eyes.
"Nourish your bodies and souls with fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and thus attain knowledge equal-nay!-superior to the one you call God!"
Adam looked at the snake for a long time. So did Eve.
The wait was nerve-wracking for the reptile. It perspired.
Finally, Adam made his move and started having sex with Eve again.
The snake momentarily pondered killing the both of them, thinking their existence barely constituted life anyhow.
Instead, the coily animal plucked the moistest fruit from the thickest limb of the Tree. It carried the produce all the way down the trunk and rolled it to the foot of the fornicating organisms.
The snake waited for Adam to ejaculate, which was mercifully soon. It then nudged the fruit upon Eve's still heaving chest.
"Eat," the snake said.
Having just finished a vigorous round of coitus and noting Adam's flaccidity, Eve could think of nothing better to do.
As she chewed, all sorts of strange new thoughts zipped through her brain. She thought about the shape of the fruit, its color, the way light reflected off its surface. She thought about matter and the true meaning of it and if the immortal soul lives within that matter or if it's just a construction of the human consciousness.
Adam hadn't yet tasted the thing, so he was mostly thinking about getting his dick hard again.
Eve pried open Adam's mouth and placed the fruit inside. He bit down. The blood rushed straight from Adam's cock into his head as his synapses began firing for pretty much the first time. "Who am I?" he thought. "What is my purpose? Do I want more from life than merely lounging around ass-naked amongst the animals and the dinosaurs?"
The snake smiled, smiled, smiled. Its job was done. It had brought thought to the thoughtless. Consciousness to the unconscious. Ambition to the bored.
Then God appeared and stomped the snake into a lumpy salsa.
This event caused Adam and Eve to think about the transience of life and how one must appreciate existence whilst blood flows within one's veins as opposed to pooling on the ground outside those veins as per the snake's current situation.
The conversation between God and the couple went as follows:
God: Why the Hell did you eat that?
Eve: It was there, God.
God: I told you not to do one fucking thing and then you go and do it.
Adam: But, dear Lord, wasn't it an exceedingly arbitrary rule?
Eve: We comprehend your glory even more effervescently now that we understand the delicate mechanics of your work.
God: You guys are fucking assholes. Get the fuck out of my garden, you're going to die, and life is going to be shit for you.
Thus, Adam and Eve realized that God was sort of a dick.
God met the humans at the Gates of Eden where he refused to make eye contact with either of them.
Adam decided to be the bigger man, "Lord, why don't we talk about this?"
To which, God responded, "Why don't you shut the fuck up and get the hell out of my eternal garden?"
* * *
Life outside the Garden started out okay, what with the couple's newfound intellect. They built a comfortable air-conditioned home on a gorgeous mountain side. They made the planet's first foosball table. They harnessed wind power and hydroelectricity to run appliances that ranged from a drip coffee maker to an 800-watt microwave. All in all, it wasn't a bad setup.
For years this went on, Adam and Eve barely mentioning their vindictive ex-land Lord.
Every now and then at breakfast, however, Eve would remark, "We should really get a hold of that God and have him over for a late-lunch, early-dinner thing."
"No," Adam would always reply.
And so it went until one certain December morning. Adam woke up with a headache. He sat up in bed and attempted to breathe through his nose but was surprised to find that air did not flow through his nostrils as it once did. Instead of breath, he heard the splatter of mucus fluttering about the inside of his nasal cavities like an army of sticky windsocks straining against the wind. Panicking, he looked to Eve who quickly invented facial tissue by stacking two squares of toilet paper on top of each other.
Adam blew his nose throughout the night. He had a sinus infection.
He still had it two days later. He even had it two weeks later. Still, two months later.
It was almost spring and Adam couldn't comfortably breathe. He was going mad.
"God is going to get it for cursing my sinuses! Hear you me, Eve!"
Eve tried to calm Adam down, "Babe, don't worry, we'll figure this out."
Well, Adam teetered on the edge of sanity for a few more snot-filled months until something happened that changed Eve's soothing tune.
The pollen count was high. It started with scratchy eyes and developed into a full facial assault of runny nose and inflamed face.
Eve had developed allergies.
"Vengeance will be ours," she said.
Adam gleefully cackled as boogers shot out his nose. He hyperventilated, regained his breath, and inhaled noisily through his mouth.
The plan was hatched: the couple would use their intelligence and technology to make God woefully regret his piss-poor attitude.
But how? What would tick God off more than anything?
The answer was immediately obvious to the Earth-dwellers: Evolution.
They began by fostering tiny one-celled organisms and breeding them into more and more complex creatures until those life forms were structurally identical to even the most complicated entity. Using their mighty science, Adam and Eve recreated all varieties of life. They went on developing connections between those species through a terrific invention they called "DNA." It made the phony theory of Evolution seem air tight. It was incontrovertible.
Oh, how they reveled in their genius. The biped defrauders spent their next birthdays hunting dinosaurs and backdating the bones by modifying the carcass' carbon isotopes.
There was but one job left to do and that was the job of propagating a version of the human species so stupid it could believe such unnatural and unintuitive facts as presented by Evolution.
With that in mind, Adam and Eve birthed many children who were put to work having sex with each other. Those children had children who had sex with each other and then they birthed children who had sex with each other, birthing children, and so on. Genetic defects compounded, becoming the rule rather than the exception.
As Adam and Eve managed their incestuous family throughout their own scientifically extended lives, they joyously noticed a downward trend in mental capacity. By the time they could no longer satisfactorily keep themselves spry, thousands of morbidly stupid human beings roamed the planet totally unaware that with every progeny producing boning, the species was losing the ability to know the truth.
After many generations of rearing retarded children, Adam and Eve finally called God. Adam said that if God could stop masturbating in heaven for just one second, he and Eve would give Him a tour of planet Earth.
God replied, "Sure, what else do I have to do on a Sunday?"
Eve led the tour, pointing out the burgeoning societies of total nincompoops. At first, God didn't put all the pieces together.
"And there you see Barry. He's our dumbest yet. We're so proud," Eve commented.
"Yes, yes, indeed. Why, yesterday I told him that when animals die, their bones sometimes become fossilized in the ground and human beings can study those fossils to know just how long ago the animals lived on planet Earth!" Adam added.
God laughed.
"And you know the best part?" Adam continued, "He believed me."
God stopped laughing.
Adam and Eve smiled all the while the lightning bolt torched their insides.
Pissed, God had Noah-the smartest guy at the time-build an Ark with which his family could live upon while the Almighty did a mulligan on the human race.
Problem was, God didn't really think it out. When the waters receded, Noah's family unsurprisingly all banged each other and the species continued to reproduce through a series of close familial encounters. People just kept getting dumber.
"Fuck it," God thought.
* * *
From then on, God steered clear of Planet Earth for the most part. This one time, he sent down his son to try and explain the whole situation, but that guy got killed.
He pretty much stopping paying attention after that.
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Thanks for this. It's one of the funniest things I've read in a LOOOOONNNNNNNGGGGGGGGG time.
In a few centuries this could well be canon.
Canon? Yes, possible. After all I lived long enough to see that praying "ejaculations" no longer could "buy" my relatives out of purgatory. (If you were not raised Catholic: I am not making this up. You REALLY did pray ejaculations to bargain relatives out of the pre-hell flames of purgatory.) As a matter of fact, the whole purgatory thing was abandoned along with unbaptized babies not seeing the face of the white haired aging God, the kindly father (who had his own son tortured and crucified for some socialistic cause.) Good job, Matt. If you can work your way through the images of Adam and Eve copulating endlessly, there is a very deep gut laugh there. Also allows one to emphatize with the frustration of the poor snake trying to make a quick sell to Eve. Reminded me of trying to get my own Mom to buy a set of Brittanica Encyclopedias on a cleaning woman's pay. Oh well - I digress. Great piece. Surprising. Caught me off guard at times with those belly laughs. Hope to see more of this stuff.
Using their mighty science, Adam and Eve recreated all varieties of life. They went on developing connections between those species through a terrific invention they called "DNA." It made the phony theory of Evolution seem air tight. It was incontrovertible.
Eve managed their incestuous family throughout their own scientifically extended lives, they joyously noticed a downward trend in mental capacity. By the time they could no longer satisfactorily keep themselves spry, thousands of morbidly stupid human beings roamed the planet totally unaware that with every progeny producing boning, the species was losing the ability to know the truth.