THEY JUST CAN’T SPEAK

by Riccardo Giacomini

The appearance has just come to an end. God has appeared today, to the whole of humanity. It is difficult to describe it, because it was so complex but at the same time so inevitable that it could not actually have been different from how it was. Kind of like a magician who explains a simple trick you would never have figured out on your own. God looked marvelous, and yet He did not look like anything, neither a person nor a plant: imagine a very solid vapour, all ruffled in surface.
He expressed Himself in gestures, so universally and unequivocally that no one has any more doubts about what he wanted us to understand.
Basically, at the beginning of time God gave us conscience and intelligence, and thanks to them we can understand a very simple thing: that fear and physical pain felt by animals are the same as ours. Terror and pain, the two most—both emotionally and physically—horrifying feelings, are the exact same for us and for an animal. The difference is that animals don’t have the gift of speech and lack our intelligence to understand that their fear and pain are identical to those experienced by other animals. Nonetheless, we have been killing millions of animals since time immemorial, in all possible ways. The knowledge that we have made ourselves guilty of that pain makes us unforgivable, He says. At the beginning, we did it to other members of our own species as well, but then, one group at a time, everyone raised their voice and we have stopped, more or less. In the end, this means that we stop to systematically and completely abuse others only if they convince us of and explain to us something we already know: that they feel fear and pain.
As He explained it, it sounded watertight.
He made us feel hypocrites, all the eight billions of us.
Someone said, in the crowd, that we still need to eat, and that from the height of His omnipotence, he should have created food that does not feel pain or fear.
He pointed at a fruit stall, and nobody spoke again.
He concluded by making us understand that it was really sweet and naive of us to believe that He had created us in His own image, and that therefore, before leaving, He would have left us the planet, thus completing the work we ourselves had started.
Then, He left, and all the animals—all of them—followed Him; it was a very beautiful scene, there was something biblical in it.
Eventually, all the dead of the past, even those who were so old they almost looked like apes, returned to Earth.
Now almost all the plants have withered. There is only us humans, we are everywhere and no one dies any more. There really are many of us and it is so hot it seems we are in hell.