This creation/destruction story my grandmother told to me when I was a small boy. She meant it mostly as a cautionary tale. After all these years, however, I still don’t know what to make of it. Let’s see if you can help me. I hope I’m remembering it right:

On a peanut farm somewhere in southeast Virginia, a poor man and his wife had a baby boy.

The father, twenty-eight at the time, had already gone as far as he figured he was allowed to go in life and was content with his lot. He’d weathered more storms than most people in that time. The mother, however, was more ambitious, and so tended to worry and inflict her worry on others. After recovering from the birth of a 19.8 pound baby, she regained enough energy to tell her husband they were fucked.

Fortunately, their families lived close by and helped out as they could. But none of them had babies of their own, so couldn’t help with the most arduous chore of childrearing a tiny human beast: breastfeeding.

The first sign that their healthy baby might have an eating disorder was the day he sucked his mother’s nipple until it hung like a popped balloon and he bit her nipple off with his insatiably gnawing gums. They didn’t know how they could buy formula. From that day on, he had to drink cow’s milk, That is,, until he learned to crawl and reach the cow’s teet and cleaned the heifer dry too.

“Be grateful for him,” Grandma said. “They grow up before you know it.”

His parents were proud, of course, in their own way. But they worried how they could keep up with his growing appetite.

Relatives and friends and church members and the government WIC program all pitched in together to buy formula, but as much as they could silo into bottle after bottle turned out futile when the boy one day just swallowed the whole bottle whole.

“This can’t be good for him,” the mother said.

“Don’t be silly,” Grandma said. “Just be patient. He’ll poop it out by morning.”

It took him two hours, and it had been thoroughly digested.

From then on, it was nothing but the finest for him. He didn’t just eat them out of house and home. He ate their house and home. They tried baby proofing it, to at least protect their sentimental heirlooms and the appliances, but it was no use. He kept them up all night munching on the sofa and Lazy Boy and coffee table and in the morning helped himself to their console TV. The mother, after slamming her head a few times against the floorboards, came up with the idea to coax her baby boy out of the house and into the peanut fields where he could crawl and graze on peanuts to his belly’s content. The boy ate row after row of peanuts. He ate the plants too. His parents were losing everything, but at least he was so humungous by they could confidently say they hadn’t let him out of their sight.

That night the boy didn’t come in for bed. He had grown too big to carry, and too big for the house. By morning, he had picked the farmland clean and sucked the irrigation system dry washing it down. They found him sitting on the barn and stuffing their last cow into his mouth whole. Then he wobbled to his feet. He held out his arms and took his first steps.

His parents could not help but feel proud, even as each new step shook the ground so that it kicked them four inches into the air.

He tugged on the hundred year oak by the house, tore it out by the roots, and he fell with it, He shook it like a rattle, giggling. His parents ran for their lives. They didn’t dare look behind them as their little bundle of joy devoured the house.

“Mommy.”

“His first word!” she screamed in delight, right before he grabbed her and ate her. Then the daddy went straight down the shoot after her.

He had by now outgrown the farm, you could say, but the world, before a mystery, now lay open wide before him. After eating wise and wizened Grandma, and all the other relatives too, like peanuts, he ran off seeking a new life of adventure, which of course for him meant food.

When he squat and peed, he created a new swampland under him. When he pooped, out came a new hillside.

Not being far from the University of Virginia, he started at the registrar’s and gobbled up every subject and fraternity it had to offer. Afterwards he polished off Monticello, Next it was Montpellier. Old buildings tasted best. So little baby went to Washington.

In a matter of minutes he consumed Congress, the Smithsonian, the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, drank up every body of water, and ate the White House for dessert. He used the National Monument as a toothpick for his little baby teeth.

He was smart too. The more cities and people he devoured, the more his vocabulary grew. He learned words like “Oh, my God, what is that thing?”, “Stop or I’ll shoot,” “holy shit,” “Jesus Christ,” “hide,” “help,” and “kill him.” He heard them a lot and repeated them often and it was great fun for him to say them over and over just like all the little ant-like people.

It took him half a month to eat North America. After quenching his thirst by sucking up the Great Lakes, he headed for East Coast. In no time he fell down and slurped up the Atlantic. His taste buds hadn’t quite fully developed, so the salt didn’t bother him, though in fairness, they had developed enough for him to appreciate the exquisite tastes and fine dining of Europe.

Onwards and upwards, of course – to Russia and into Asia, the boy had gotten so big that the grand cities below him seemed, at most, like tiny blocks to kick and play with. Nobody told him not to play with his food.

Meanwhile, by now, the whole world was ablaze and angling to fight back. It was missiles launched into his butt that grabbed his attention. It was his first spanking. He held his breath, blowing into his cheeks until red, and squeezed his eyes until he shot snot down his lip. He let out a scream that supersonically shock-waved simultaneously all the jets within a five-hundred mile radius. He grabbed his butt with both hands and scraped it across the ground. It didn’t help him or the remaining earthbound inhabitants he smeared beneath him.

The little bangs and puffs of smoke from all the devastating catastrophes around him cheered him up.. He liked bangs and puffs of smoke. The missiles still stung, but he didn’t mind so much now he could play his game of smashing things. But after a while, his tummy rumbled.

What a big boy he was. He sat on top the world like a bouncing ball. His head reached over the clouds and into the blackness of space. It scared him at first. He ducked his head back down, and it was light again. “Ha, ha, he,” said, and bounced. Black now, now light again, now black. The more he bounced, the higher he could bounce into darkness and drop back into light. First the brown earth and blue sky, then black space, the moon, the sun, and stars. He grabbed hold of the moon. It looked so good to eat.

Very few people lived to feel all this bouncing. In Antarctica, the Polynesian Islands, and the deepest heart of Africa, the surviving men, women and children huddled and hid.

One or two brave souls ventured out. The earth was off kilter, so they had to lean from side to side just to stand straight. While they skirmished around the big ball, the boy bit a chunk from it as if it were an apple. It turned lopsided, spinning so fast almost all the rest of population went hurling into outer space.

A small expedition was formed, equipped with grappling hooks and cleats. They latched the boy’s big toe and pulled themselves up. The boy was sitting, so they were able to scale his legs without peril. None of it, however, proved easy. The inexperienced fell to their death securing grapples into the boy’s navel. At least, at such altitudes, his body provided warmth. The hardest feat was rappelling over the belly. All told, it took them four tortuous weeks to reach the boy’s shoulder and catch a grapple on his ear lobe.

“Boy!” one of the men shouted. “What’s your name?”

“Holy shit,” the boy said, not knowing any better. “Jesus Christ.”

A psychiatrist on the expedition noted the boy’s exaggerated God complex. “He is merely experiencing a grandiose manic phase of schizophrenic bipolar disorder,” he said, before he was eaten.

A marine reserve threatened to poke the boy’s eyes out, though he two got swallowed whole.

But a teacher demanded the more motherly approach.. “It’s okay!” she shouted up at him. And with all her breath she yelled a lullaby. “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word…” Unfortunately, she couldn’t finish. The boy craned and licked them all up.

The bouncing baby boy finally tired of bouncing. He couldn’t keep his balance, because the earth kept spinning under him. He hugged it tight and rocked back and forth with it until both he and the big bouncing ball went tumbling out of orbit.

He gasped and sucked in some satellites, bumped the moon and knocked it like a pool ball into a corner pocket. His stomach growled—loud enough for inhabitants of Jupiter to take notice. The fast shrinking earth was looking more and more like a watermelon. He took too big bites, into Australia and South America, respectively, not even minding the rind. Afterwards, he had his first swimming lesson through the Milky Way. The earth was now the size of a gum ball. So with one fell gulp, the toddler swallowed the world.

It gave him a tummy ache.

Now with no earth to obstruct it, the sun shone bright. Bright enough to Venus and Mercury, which he ate first. The sun burned his fingers, so he swam to Mars. Every planet and moon was a pleasant morsel. Some, astronomers will never discover, digested before their time. For desert, the boy flew back to the sun, but of course it gave him very bad heartburn.

No one ever told him not to eat the sun.

So poof! Everything went dark. His eyes had to adjust to all the other twinkling stars, which hung in the universe like shiny toys on a mobile. He swatted at them while sucking in meteors and a comet or two. It was fun watching them, but only for a while. He grabbed the big dipper’s ladle and drank some of them, like alphabet soup, and then chewed the handle. Ursa Major and Minor fought like mama bears. Orion strung his bow and shot his arrow straight into the boy’s butt. The scorpion stung, so he drank the Milky Way to cool his tongue. Virgo tried to hold him, but she couldn’t pick him up.

The more he ate, the more he was offered. Solar systems, galaxies, black holes—planets like dried marshmallows in hot chocolate, stars like bright hot pepper seeds. The boy kept growing until, finally, there wasn’t really anything more to eat.

What was left? There was only God.

God thought to himself now that. in hindsight, he was probably way too indulgent with the boy. Typically, to interfere went against his nature. But by this time, it’s fair to say he was pissed.

“You fucking little brat,” he said. “What the hell have you done? You ruined my good creation!

The boy was quiet. He’d just woken up from his nap.

Grow up, would you?” God said. “Jesus H. Christ, I don’t have time for this shit.”

Probably not the best word choice on God’s part. In point of fact, the boy was now just a little bigger than his creator.

And so the boy opened his mouth great big widely and, sticking out his tongue, he let the almighty fly in like an airplane down the hatch.

Which pretty much puts an end to this story. For those who ever believed in a beginning, middle and an end.

There was nothing left to eat.

Nothing.

And good thing too that the boy was now full. There was finally an end to hunger.

But he did have a terrible tummy ache.

The boy had never in his short life felt so much pain. This of course can come from overeating. He held his stomach and cried, but the pain wouldn’t go away. (There wasn’t anyone around to hear him anyway). After about a week of this fit, which was either Sunday or Saturday, if that matters to anyone, he threw everything back up.

Everything that had been returned. Only in a much different form.

Then the boy died.

Everything the boy vomited up became the new universe, the one we know today. So, I suppose, everything now is more or less how it was before. Maybe not quite so nice. But what else is new?

THE END

This story serves as a lesson to all little boys and girls. Don’t be a pig. Eat all your vegetables and clean your plate, but don’t spoil your supper. Never ask for seconds, because there isn’t any. Besides, now you know exactly what will happen if you do.

THE END

(really)

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