(Page 1 of 6) Loose by Vasilis AfxentiouSUMMARY: "Would you prefer Nemesis, the Great Deluge or Sodom and Gomorra all over again? Religion is sanctioned as a proviso of faith. No faith, no religion. No religion...Man is next. Are You ready for Man on the loose?"
Loose
Up top, Charlie's eye seemed to be glued on what he held. He dithered more, undecided.
Meanwhile down below, Satan's jaws crunched. He strutted back and forth in the gloomy fissure, the deep-most in His blaze-lit, sulphur-reeking sovereignty, and His rusty chaffed face with nostrils flaring, glared up and sneered, snorting grunts and chuffing and casting bandeaux of spume.
He raised His yellow-brown hands incitingly, "I crave for the Inquisition, the children's crusades, the sprightful witch hunts, and those two sublime mushrooming obfuscations. Ah, those were the days, My lackeys."
Lately He had been having these pricks of elation, pangs of notorious jubilance. He espied on Charlie and other mortals above--mingled in crowds, snooped and eavesdropped to locate the source of these affections--but soon would become weary of their pointless prattle and skeptical attitude towards Evil. In place of rash rage and fury, He found them ruminating and poring over Freud and Hawking.
He spat.
Hadn't He racked and abused them enough over the aeons? Such spleen and spite gone to waste. He anticipated exclusively the vilest, blindest passions and ill will to rule.
Instead...He got blinked at.
"Inactivity is what's doing it."
"But idle hands are the Devil's workshop," a red-eyed demon puffed out.
"See!" He hissed. "Even the laws of darkness are being confounded!"
Inaction was lacquering as well His own animosity to shoddy resentment, fraying His hostility down to the scruffy crust of His rangy clientele.
"Business is going to the dogs," He snarled and the gargoyles rattled nigh His clacking hoofs.
All the slithering things hissed and sputtered, defecated and slobbered down in the blistering guts of the earth.
"Isn't it the way it ought to be?" a scaly imp fumed from the ghastly gallery.
The underworld fell silent.
Satan swelled and let fly a jet of gore on the apprentice imp. "We never use the word ‘ought' here."
***
Vexed, Satan came up once again to meddle and pry.
He found mid-August a scorcher. Crickets popped from the heat, burst like pop-corn in near-by thistle and pines and toppled to the ground shattered. Lizards scurried for cover at His approach. A summer ruby dragonfly flittered and dipped almost vertical in His path, then vaulted out of view. Clouds of metallic blue butterflies dispersed off their gold and waxen perches and rippled over his head.
He emerged close-by to the gates of Hell, a sandy stretch nudists patronised on the Aegean called Esperanza Island. To each side the beach spanned as level and regular as could be conceived for a kilometer or so. Then with a dull, lethargic bounce commenced to worm inward, finally rising in a smooth curve to meet the foot of the single distant mountain on the isle, behind a precipice, like some broad highway from the sea.
He pulled his horns in. Sucked his tail. Shucked off His scales. And metamorphosed into the Angel He once was.
He pouted out his lips, "God it's hot," He said, His new alto voice husky and almost as raspy as a man's.
"Did You call Me?" a tumult boomed from the sky.
The Old Man stood like an ancient Atlas on billowed white clouds, majestic and towering.
"O Lord!" Satan fidgeted with his nakedness.
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