Satan’s Tongue
Both Sidney and Trevor sit at the edge of pure understanding—looking over. From where they are situated all can be seen in the vast expansion of true knowledge, but nothing can be seen straight down. There’s a word for this that lingers just outside of their scope of understanding; some word that has described all of these conditions before—the way human bodies interact to their surroundings—are overwhellemed by the pure sense of wonder that comes from the small plastic voice in the back of their brains telling them to jump and find out.
The biological components don’t allow for that; it’s a fundamental construct to want to survive. All animals which to survive; all animals wish to flourish and keep their livelihoods for as long as they possibly can; there are few that would willingly choose death.
“Perhaps that’s what makes us human.” Sidney says breaking their respective trains of thought.
“What?”
“The fact that we don’t jump from this cliff right now.”
Trevor’s not surprised that Sidney managed to understand things and voice them so concrete. It was always like him—even when they were young—to explain in concrete words what they were thinking. He was the talker, the one who would find his way out of situations by spinning a dazzling web of wordplay. His many girlfriends in the past said his tongue was of many uses; that he had the slim ability to manipulate situations at any given moment—that somehow they had all come out the bad one: the slut, the harlot, the whore. Trevor new there was something else to describe that; stories that had been told and read to him when he was young and in church. Stories of serpents who could talk you straight to hell before you knew it—if your strength in God wasn’t there. Trevor’s never was. He considered himself on the path to hell already. He never knew what that meant.
“I don’t think you could consider common sense a humanistic trait” Trevor says, “animals wouldn’t jump either. They’d want to live.”
Sidney’s eyes spark up again, chess board lined up: pieces where they’re supposed to go. He readies himself for the next attack; already you can see his tongue flickering in the background, his teeth gleaming with excitement, the rush of air pushing into his lungs and moving his chest up in the natural rhythm of life. Trevor bows his head and waits for the on-coming assault.
“Ah”, he starts, “but it’s not that we want to survive, it’s that we choose to forgo the unknown under the guise of our lives.”
Trevor pushes the dirt around with his shoe, he scuffs up the ground and makes a giant smiley face in the dirt. Sidney rambles on as he fishes his phone out of his pocket and replies to a text from David:
How’s it going
Eh. You?
What’s wrong?
Same old same old.
:c
The air catches him on the face and sends a shiver down his spine causing him to shake miraculously for a moment or two. He steps towards the cliff and then steps back, thanks God that he didn’t fall off. Sidney looks over at him and gives a sort of shrug before motioning towards him.
“You understand what I mean?” He asks.
“Sure.” Trevor replies.
The light from his phone pierces through the air again:
Don’t be sad, cheer up please.
I’m okay, I’m not sad. Just bored.
You could come over we could make some excitement c;
Hahaha.
Trevor remembers what his bible-study teachers used to tell him about God and Satan. He used to go to Sunday school every Sunday; they’d hold it in this building just outside and to the left o f the church building and the teachers—mostly parents volunteering—would talk about God and Jesus and Satan; they’d bring snacks and stickers and activity books and you’d write in them something like: I love God because he’s good to me underneath the blank that asked: “who do you love most in life.” Then everyone would smile and laugh and he’d leave feeling afraid of hell and promising to do better.
Come on just for tonight, me and you, plz.
Idk.
I’ll let you be top c;
Ha.
Sidney’s still in the background chattering on about the human spirit and the condition between us and animals. He’s factoring in all sorts of things; making connections that don’t exist, trying his hardest to impress—to be right.
“The thing is,” he says, “We are just animals and like animals we have basic needs that we should fulfill you know. Like sex. We need sex in life. It’s foolish to think we don’t. It’s a primal need, a basic instinct: to fornicate!”
Come on. You know you want to.
“And it’s foolish that we should try to dissect that any further you know? Of course you know. It’s what makes us different from basic animals. It’s what makes us special. It’s what makes us so strange—“
It’ll be fun
“—We refuse to go into the night. We refuse to jump off that cliff—“
Don’t be such a prude
“—because we fear the unknown, because we choose life instead of death; because we know it’s valuable.”
I need you tonight bby c;
Trevor looks over across the vast expansion of truth and through the pinnacle of understanding. He looks over at Sidney flashing his teeth in the night, down to his phone’s light that cuts through the black fabric of the night. He sees the flicking tongue appear and chase him around, hears the words of his Sunday school teachers—warning him of Satan. They all become jumbled up; they all flow into one another—one becomes two and so forth. He can’t distinguish the past from the future, he can’t distinguish hell from heaven from earth. All he sees in front of him is an endless stretch of blackness known as truth. He steps off the cliff.
