My awfully wedded wife had finally discovered how to utterly destroy humanity. It was a plan so simple, so elegant it couldn’t possibly fail, and being who I am, it couldn’t possibly succeed, either. Repercussions, logistics to sort out and questions we all wanted to avoid.

A nightmare enchilada of global proportion. She had to be stopped.

“You don’t think you’re going to stop me, do you? I’d handle your job so much better than you. You’ve gone far too soft these past few years. I’ve been here long enough by now, I know all the technicalities no matter what Saint Peter thinks, and poor Asmodeus needs something constructive to do, he gets bored so easily….”

Lilith paced the floor in front of my chair and thought out loud, but I had already tuned her out. Four thousand years of a miserable marriage will have that effect. As she kept talking and pacing, I just sat back and watched her, watched that long, leggy stride eat up the rug in six steps, watched her turn as elegant as any runway model, blonde hair swinging, before pacing back again.

She was flawless. Flawlessly beautiful in that twenty-first century porn-star manner that left no room for imperfections, quirks or doubts, and flawless bored me.

Besides, any woman who begins every single sentence with ‘I’ is nothing but trouble. Trust me. I know.

“You don’t understand at all, do you?” I finally said. “For you, it’s all so simple, all so black-and-white, all so nicely categorized into tidy little boxes that say it must be a cinch to do my job. Nothing is that simple, Lilith.”

“Four thousand years, and you still sound like a scratched vinyl LP, don’t you? ‘Nothing is that simple’ ” she taunted. “Bullshit. Just more male chauvinist pseudo-philosophical cant from someone who thinks he’s better than me simply for having a penis…”

Did I tell you that my lovely wife became a screaming lesbian just to spite me? Nothing against lesbians, but spite. Really.

She’s Queen of the Succubi. No coincidence.

The instant before I tuned her out again, my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. It was a text message from Saint Peter.

“God’s study. All done. Wait for it!”

If she only knew what I was planning.

I stood up to leave.

Surprised at the names? The truth would surprise you even more.

Once, you needed to give the personification of evil an evil face, needed to dehumanize and externalize it to make it easier to identify. If your history has taught you anything, it’s that true evil can wear any face at all. Including your own.

Forget the lies you’ve been force-fed since childhood. Forget that I am supposed to be God’s adversary. Like all dogma and most religion, it’s nothing but a select few shining truths wrapped around a hundred million incandescent, mind-controlling lies.

I’ve been called so many different names I can’t take them seriously any longer. Satan, The Devil, Lucifer, Apollyon, The Fallen One, Evil Incarnate, Mephistopheles, Son of the Morning Star, Shaitan, The Adversary – you humans have never lacked imagination. I don’t have cloven feet, do not in fact look or function much different than you should I choose.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I had a wife I needed to destroy before she destroyed humanity. I needed a little human help. Once upon a time the present Queen of the Succubi was human, before she forced herself upon me and refused to let me go.

So Saint Peter was given an assignment. To find a human intelligent enough to do the job, someone amenable to the benefits we could provide, who could handle the inevitable horrors that came with it. Over six billion humans on Earth, and we only needed one.

A woman.  Since nothing destroys a woman like another one.

But if I have to put myself on the line here Saint Peter, I thought to myself as I left Hell behind me and climbed the stairs to God’s study, make sure she’s got a nice pair of tits.

And if you can, please make her a blonde.

☠ ☠ ☠