The gods were angry. They had been told that they were as no more than a grain of sand in their sad little realm. This blasphemous eructation, spewed from the mouth of a leprous monkey, was overheard by Iris, the rainbow messenger handmaiden of Hera. It was she who used the power of gossip to alert the world. Disaster followed.
Once the other monkeys learned that one of their own had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, they cast down their banana bonds and coconut cuffs and gorged themselves on the figs. An oikofugic fugue enveloped them; many simians were torn between leaving their homes and embarking on wondrous journeys.
The monkeys that were consumed by wanderlust became the diaspora that culminated not only in cities of skyscrapers, but also the logical conclusion: a sidereal quest to conquer the universe. From the first rough-hewn canoe to the mighty rockets constructed by their human slaves, the monkeys finally learned about the great cosmic beach of which their ancestor spoke.
The few that remained teamed up with dolphins. They built ivory towers, into which they retreated, emerging only to vomit out an occasional sesquipedalian gallimaufry of delitescent gems, such as the laws of gravity, the principles of psephology and the futility of fad diets.
Sadly, their progeny corrupted the knowledge for such trivial pursuits as jumping across canyons in mechanized conveyances; manipulating voting results; getting rich off the fat people of the land. The dolphins foresaw these perversions and turned to the oceans, leaving the monkeys to puzzle out a solution to the oxymoron of refractory evolution.
Naturally, the gods didn't stand still. They consulted the Oracle at Delphi, in search of an explanation for its lack of warning. In typical fashion, the Oracle's priestesses came back with a verse:
Spiracle hole in the dark cosmos. Whispering secrets and lies.
Gordius, Ockham defeated. The gazing abyss sees Medusa.
Unable to untangle the meaning from ligature of the lyric, the gods expired into irrelevance.
Copyright © 2017 by Mitchell Allen
Originally appeared on CreativeCopyChallenge #475.