The Human Experience

I attempt here to tell a story of lovely Jude. I will try to tell the facts alone.

Jude’s Mother and Father are the nicest people. So nice. They raise their only boy to be a sensation. His instructors are Brahms, Bach, and Galileo. Jude is the beloved, and he knows it.

When he is twelve he asks why God made the animals. Mother says he created the animals to show his creativity and his love. Jude asks how love was embodied in the centipede. Mother says that we know God is loving because he cares even for creepy critters like centipedes. Jude asks how God could love the animals, but make them kill each other. (Jude, Mother and Father are all vegans.) Mother says that in the beginning all the animals were calm and friendly to one another. She adds, “God made all the animals equal. They all had their special skills, and they could all talk. That’s why Eve wasn’t surprised when the serpent spoke to her.”

“You see,” she continues, “It was man’s sin that did it. That’s what made the animals go mute.” Jude never forgots this.

On Jude’s twentieth birthday he asks his first girlfriend to marry him. She blushes, then declines. Jude is sad. He walks the streets wondering how this world could be so simultaneously alive and dead.

Jude is a beautiful creature. His long black locks highlight his sky blue eyes. He takes care of his body and his resume. Mother and Father teach him to never underestimate the power of a manicured smile.

At age twenty-nine Jude falls in love again. He loves everything about the girl: her puffy cheeks, her rainbow colored socks, her affection for dolphins. The quirks all add up to the very definition of love. She left him.

Jude takes a walk.

He walks by a pond. School is out for some happy ducklings. Jude stands there. They’re so cute. They come up to him. They do not fear him at all. An old, mean memory returns to him. His first girlfriend loved meat and hated Jude’s resistance to omnivorism. She wanted him to suffer for his faith.

Pinkies, she explains, are what ugly baby rats are called. They are blind, naked pink things with four legs. Often they are fed to snakes. When a pinky is dropped into the cage of an already satiated snake, the pinky, alone and cold, cuddles up to the serpent. The snake lets pinky warm itself against her smooth skin. Pinky sleeps with its enemy. It bonds to her, as it should to its mother. A day or two or three later, when the snake decides she’s ready to engorge herself once more, she consumes pinky whole.

The littlest duckling quacks. Jude weeps badly. He moans aloud. He breaks its little neck. He breaks all their little necks.

That’s the story. That’s all of it. I was Jude’s second girlfriend.

There is too much pain in the world.