(BORGER dressed for bed.)
BORGER:
Goodnight, children, goodnight. Time for beddybies. Time to climb the wooden hill to Bedfordshire. Now close your eyes and I’ll tell you a story. Close your eyes. Well, where to start, where to start.
There was once a place, long time ago now, where everybody was happy.
Trees grew green, and fruit was the biggest, ripest, fruitiest fruit you’d ever seen. And everybody was happy, even when they weren’t. Yes, everybody was happy, except for the Snake.
He was the slippiest, sneakiest, snakiest Snake that ever was and ever is. And he wasn’t happy. He was angry and bitter and slimy and wicked and angry. He didn’t like the happy people, and he didn’t like their God.
Their God had planted the fruit, and grown the trees, and tended the garden, and – between you and me – made the Snake and the happy people and the whole kit and caboodle. The Snake hated that – hated all of that – cause the Snake didn’t want to be how God had made him, but then that was how God had made him. So the Snake made sure the happy people got thrown out of the Garden, made sure they got thrown out so bad they couldn’t ever get back in, couldn’t even tell you quite where it was if you asked them, and the happy people weren’t so happy any more.
And cause they weren’t so happy any more, they started listening to the Snake – which wasn’t very clever, since it was his fault they weren’t so happy any more – and the Snake told them that their brothers had it better than them and if their brothers weren’t going to share what they had then the not-so-happy-any-more people should make them share it. And the not-so-happy-any-more people believed the Snake – which wasn’t so smart, since their brothers were their brothers and the Snake was just a snake.
So the not-so-happy-people started making guns and knives and bombs to make their brothers give them what they thought their brothers had. And their God watched all of this, and their God cried.
He tried stopping all of it and starting again, but the Snake just started it all up again. He tried sending His Son down – who was Himself as well, but that’s another story – but the Snake had Him killed and the whole thing started up again. And their God watched all of this, and their God cried again. But He smiled too, cause He’d made the not-so-happy people and He’d made them so they could choose between what He said and what the Snake said, and He knew that those that listened to Him would live forever and those that listened to the Snake would burn forever, so that was alright.
Cause He knew that when the fighting and the greed and the hating and the slippery snakiness of the not-so-happy people got too much that He was going to send down His children – who weren’t really His children, but were His servants and His angels – and they’d pluck up all the good and happy people and fly them to Heaven, and leave the bad and not-so-happy people to the Snake. So he smiled while He was crying. And all the happy people on the Earth smiled too, cause they knew His Children were coming soon, and they knew they were doing all they could to help their God in His plan.
So you close your eyes, and go to sleep and think nice happy people thoughts, and when you wake up you’ll be in Heaven with our God our Father and we’ll be nice happy people forever and ever and ever.
Close your eyes. Goodnight, children, goodnight.