I never understood people who put mini-cacti in their home. Because cacti are covered in thorns.
What does a plant have to do, exactly, for you to understand that you need to mind your own business? Slap your gran around? What a plant has to do? They’re covered in stings, they’re like knives.
They’re the West Ham football hooligans of the floral world. You don’t put a football hooligan – but mini – on top of your fridge, above a Majorca magnet and one of your daughter’s shitty drawings, because it wants to kill you. What the fuck are you doing?
When God made the cactus, most probably, this is the conversation that has happened:
“So, cactus, I can see from your file that you love people. You really love people.”
“Well, I’d love to be as precise as possible on this point, because I believe that there must be a typo, seeing how heavily people get on my tits.”
“Well, they’re made in my image, so it’s a bit insulting, but still, no problem! No problem! Last night I was shitfaced, and I invented this thing: it’s called thorns, or quills, okay? And I put them all on a massive mouse, and I called it – listen here – porcupine. Not mouseupine. No, no. Porcupine, because I’m an artist, out of control.”
And the cactus said:
“I like this thorns thingy, I like it. If at all possible, I’d also love to have a kalashnikov.”
“No, bro, no… no need. No. Listen here, listen: you’re green, and covered in thorns. And they are made in my image. They’ll understand. They will.”
Every cactus on top of a fridge right now is:
“PISSIN’ HEEEEELL! THEY GIFT ME INSIDE A WEDDING FAVOUR! FUUUUUUUCK!”
Don’t ever place a firearm next to a cactus. Don’t tempt fate like that.
It was once a simple matter. Thousands of years ago, people worshipped the Sun as a god, making sacrifices of all sorts—virgins, goats, perhaps even a few particularly enthusiastic charioteers— everything from which you could extract a still pulsating heart to appease the giant ball of fiery gas that could make or break harvests and tans. The Sun, ever the attention-seeker, didn’t mind. In fact, it quite enjoyed the praise.
It gavee life to everything you see and you can feel its warmth on your skin, and – in exchange – it only demanded that a ribcage or two were cracked open like a walnut she’ll at Christmas time, every now and again. It sounds like a toxic relationship, but these were different times. The good old days.
Then, as history often does, it got complicated. Along came a chap, no less that on the day of the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti – or the “birthday of the invincible Sun” – on December 25th, and said “Why are you all celebrating the Sun? Today is Jesus’s birthday! Always has been! I mean, not always, maybe, but, you know…” and suddenly, the Sun’s big day was overshadowed by someone else’s birthday. The audacity of it all! After millennia of being the center of attention, the Sun was unceremoniously shoved aside by a bearded carpenter, a man who wouldn’t have known a solstice if it slapped him across the face.
A man so obviously less powerful than the Sun. And the Sun knew it well. You can’t stare at the Sun for more than a second, you can stare at a crucifix until you fall asleep, because there are sunglasses, not Jesusglasses. There are solar panels, not Christ panels. The Sun gives you skin’s cancer, Jesus cannot cure it.
There’s simply no context.
At first, it didn’t seem so bad. The Sun still got some mention in passing, perhaps as a metaphor or a glowing reference in a sermon or two. But no hearts were ripped from ribcages to praise it. It was simply no way to live. But the Sun wasn’t the type to forget a slight. Slowly, over the centuries, a subtle resentment began to simmer. Instead of openly confronting the problem—perhaps sending a few angry rays to scorch the city of Rome—the Sun took a far more calculated approach. It did what all truly passive-aggressive entities do: it started to make life uncomfortable, just enough to make you think. It was a slow burn. Literally. Every year, a fraction of a degree warmer. “Oh look, still no sacrifices, let me turn up the thermostat!”
Cli-click.
Minor heatwave here, a summer that was just a little hotter there. It wasn’t immediately noticeable. People simply chalked it up to “weather patterns” or “human activity”—foolishness, of course, because we all know that nothing in the cosmos happens without some sort of celestial motive behind it. The Sun, with all its solar flare and fiery bravado, was sending a message.
Eventually, things heated up. Politicians, ever the experts in obfuscation, began blaming either climate change or telling us that global warming was a myth. Meanwhile, the Sun, content to let its heat rise a degree or two every year, sat back and chuckled.
Like that chap at the office that keeps cranking up the heat until everyone else starts sweating bullets and looks at each other wondering who is going to say something. And still, we didn’t sacrifice even a chipmunk to the Sun.
And so, in a rather quiet and entirely undignified fashion, the Sun exacted its revenge. Each year, another degree. The ice caps melted.
The Sun is reminding us, one degree at a time, that it would not be ignored.
No one likes a birthday party hijacker, and the Sun was no exception. But instead of an all-out tantrum, it’s decided to take the long game approach.
Now that we finally realised we’re all sweating buckets under the Sun’s unrelenting glare, it is too late to send an apology card.
Am I suggesting that we should bring back human sacrifices?
Yes.
That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. After all, what’s the point of being all-powerful if no one’s paying attention?
It’s a tough day for the Devil. You can tell by the way he is brooding over his desk, shuffling through what used to be the most valuable commodity in the universe: human souls. He’s not happy. Not because he’s out of souls – far from it. No, it’s because he’s come to a brutal realisation: souls are now utterly worthless. They’ve been devalued. And no one’s even noticed.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. Souls used to be the currency of damnation. People used to sell them like it was a get-rich-quick scheme. A quick little path here, a Faustian bargain there, and bam, eternal suffering in exchange for a shiny new car, a successful marriage, or a mildly successful music career. The Devil’s business was booming, everything was going according to plan. Hell was packed with the whiny, the selfish, and the ethically bankrupt – the usual clientele.
But now? Well, now the Devil’s sitting there, looking at his soul portfolio, and it’s like he’s holding a bag of expired coupons. The market has crashed. People are still signing contracts, sure, but what they’re offering isn’t worth the blood it’s written in. The souls have been diluted, rendered meaningless. The Devil’s got an office full of souls, but they’re like crappy timeshares or a cheap knockoff handbag you buy in a back alley – everyone’s got one, no one values them, and they only lead to disappointment.
He’s pacing around his penthouse in Hell, thinking that – the way things are going – he won’t be able to afford anything better than a shack, soon. Trying to figure out what happened. The thing is, souls have always been the commodity. They were sacred in their misery.
But now? Now souls are like a blue tick on a social media handle.
The Devil knows who to blame, of course. And of course it’s Him: God. Back when there were only two souls, the original two -Eve and Adam- back then, yes! Souls used to be true Wealth. The Devil’s chest still puffs up at the memory. He managed to corrupt them, to make them eat the apple, and to mark them with the original sin.
But, oh no: ever the sore loser, God couldn’t accept it. He wanted to keep playing, so He had created more souls. Eve gave birth with great pain and so on and so on, and now there were – how many billions of souls on Earth? Seven, eight, nine? Even the Devil couldn’t be arsed keeping count, anymore. They kept growing exponentially, anyway.
Back in the day, there was a king. From where again? Phrygia or something. Anyway, he was called Midas and wanted to turn to gold everything he touched, so Dionysus granted him his wish. The gift became soon a curse.
If everything gets turned into gold, soon the market gets saturated, and the gold becomes pretty much worthless.
It was genius! This is still studied in Hell’s schools. Turn the greed of humans into their ruin. The Devil used to laugh at Midas and his short sight.
You know what the Devil doesn’t find funny? When it’s God Almighty making the same short-sighted mistake, and souls now are worth as much as a fistful of Monopoly money.
“Almighty my bollocks, that’s like the first rule of market they teach you in business school” the Devil curses under his breath, as he watches the stock arrow of the souls market plummeting down to an abyss that even the Lord of Hell finds to be too deep.
The Devil doesn’t know what to do with Himself. He thought about pivoting into something else, maybe offering “eternal pain with an experience package” or selling VIP access to personal damnation tours, but everything is so commodified now. Hell has become a subscription service, a streaming platform for your worst nightmares, with way too many ads.
Maybe the worst part of it all? The Devil looks at humanity and realises they don’t care. They don’t need to be tricked into selling their souls anymore. They’re already doing it willingly, like they’re on some kind of endless, dopamine fuelled treadmill.
People don’t need an eternal afterlife of suffering to ruin their existences. They’re perfectly capable of doing it themselves, one bad decision at a time. Gambling, shopping spree, career choices, the irrational hate – it’s all a slow burn, and the Devil isn’t even the one holding the match anymore. He’s just a passive observer now, watching humanity self-destruct.
It isn’t even funny, in a B-horror movie kind of way. In fact, it’s fairly pathetic.
So here he is, sitting there with his stack of worthless souls, wondering if maybe the end of the world isn’t the worst thing after all. Maybe it’s time for a career change. Hell’s not what it used to be – not when you’re competing with 24 hours news cycles, reality TV, oligarchy being paraded as democracy, and influencers promising you the “ultimate experience” for just a low, low price. The Devil realises that in a world where people are selling their happiness for the smallest thrills, the soul has no intrinsic value. Maybe it never did, even when there weren’t so many around.
At this point, the Devil just shrugs. He’s already got the soul of humanity – and it has been paying dividend for centuries. But right now, he’s got a stack of paperwork to burn, an inbox full of apocalyptic memes, and no one left to torment.
Cantankerous Cockerel 