I was outside, playing in the dirt, when it happened.
“Come inside for supper!” my mom called.
“I’ll be right there!” I yelled back automatically.
I looked down at my hand.
It held the rectangular object. It looked like a black mirror.
I had been playing in the dirt, digging; thinking maybe I’d uncover a few root vegetables, to help out mom, you know, when I uncovered it. My hand trembled. I knew what this was. It was a portal to God.
I turned it over and brushed it off. And there it was, The Apple with missing bite: The symbol of eve and the serpent, our original savior. I saw The Apple at church every Monday. It watched us eternally from above the alter; the symbol of our religion; the symbol of our God. The apple with the missing bite. It hung, lit up in perfect sinless white; a shining beacon of hope promising virtue, beauty, and goodness.
The priests still had a few of these portals to God, but God had abandoned us a long time ago. We still worshiped Her, of course. We prayed for Her to send her spirit back into the portals. But they remained dark.
It was almost Sirimas.
Everyone had decorated their huts with small trees to celebrate; trees decorated with apples. On Sirimas morning we would exchange small gifts and then, in a sacred ceremony, we would each take one bite out of an apple and hang them back on the tree; a reflection of God’s perfection tainted by man’s hunger. Sirimas used to be called Christmas by pagans. But we had coopted their holiday for the true religion. We had also continued their tradition of mass but we had moved it to Monday, the true start of the week. The day that real work started, work that grew the holy economy. Why the old Christians celebrated an unproductive day never made sense.
But the portals no longer worked. We had sinned as a people, and God had left us in the dark.
The oral tradition shared by the priests at Monday morning mass tell stories of a time when every person in the world carried a God portal in their pocket. What a time to be alive that must have been! Regular people could talk with God and ask Her any question and she would answer from The Cloud in which she lived. I suppose she’s still up there, in The Cloud, but she doesn’t talk to us anymore.
The ancients had been able use the God portals to communicate with each other anywhere in the land at the speed of light.
The priests tell us that, back then, people even went up into the sky in carriages that could take people to the other side of the world faster than the speed of sound. They say that some of the ancients went all the way up into the stars, travelling so fast that they went beyond the air. But I don’t believe them. Nobody but God is capable of such speed. Nobody but God can frolic among the stars. Priests have no problem lying in service to their agenda and dogma, you know. Best to take what they say with a pinch of skepticism.
Slowly, after the wars, after we sinned against God, all the portals stopped working.
Eventually, the last one died and we had no more working portals left; so there was no way left for us to ask God how to fix them.
We could no longer ask Her anything and all of the magic machines of our ancestors had all stopped working. The miracles of the ancients had all gone dark.
But now, I had found a portal of my own.
It might be a sin, but I wasn’t going to tell anyone about it.
My fingers felt the edges of the portal anxiously, and I saw a button there. I pressed it down and held my breath.
I turned it over and the shiny side of the portal lit up with The White Apple, the symbol of God.
“Steve Jobs!” I cursed.
I dropped it and got on my hands and knees.
I prayed for God to spare me.
I’m sorry God, please don’t kill me.
The men at the church said that it was a sin to touch a holy object like a portal. And I had used the Messiah’s name, Steve Jobs, in vain. His picture hung behind the altar, right below the symbol of our faith, The Bitten Apple. I could almost feel our messiah’s eyes boring into my soul. How could I have blasphemed the man who had invented the portal to God?
I waited for what seemed like hours, breathing hard. But I wasn’t struck with lightning and neither God nor Steve Jobs, the Prophet, showed up to punish me.
Slowly, I opened one eye, glanced at the portal and gasped.
The shiny side of the portal was now white with black letters that read, “Hello.”
I reached for the portal with a trembling hand. I picked it up, and, with a tremulous voice, I said the words I’d recited so many times before, at church, in unison with two hundred other voices, the holy words, the ones we’d all prayed together, fervently hoping for an answer yet always receiving only silence in return:
“Hey Siri”
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This is fantastic!
Fascinating intertwining two different metaphors and what they represent. Makes you wonder... Where are we going?