There he was, skipping lightly across the surface of the water. He caught my eye and gave me that shit-eating grin again. “Be of good cheer. It is I. Be not afraid.

Her eyes narrowed. “That is not the boy I raised.

Every muscle in his body tensed for action, adrenalin pounding through his tiny veins, he crept down the stairs, keeping to the corners (where he knew they creaked less). He peered around the bottom of the stairwell into the living room, and there he saw a lean, bearded man, clad only in a loincloth and a crown of thorns. When he bent over the Xmas tree, Tony saw that blood flowed freely from his bare hands and feet. Before the cherubic prepubescent could stop himself, the words flew out of his mouth: “You’re not Santa!

Jesus shook his head slowly from side to side, then thrust his left hand deep into Santa’s sack. Out came something resembling raw steak, slippery and pulsating, throbbing crimson fluid in every direction. Yanking up my shirt, he rapidly pressed his other hand against my right side. He closed his eyes, and I watched as the healthy liver in his hand became corrugated and cirrhotic. I then found myself, sealed once more within my prison of flesh, disgorging bile and ethanol from every orifice.

Oh, this is not the time for us to get into that meshugenah debate again! Look, the point is that Jesus of Nazareth, who is a very big deal to the Boss, regardless of whatever metaphysically bewildering relationship they may have, has gone missing, on the eve of the single most important event in the history of Creation. The sentence parses, don’t look at me like that. And, through a comical series of events far too elaborate to detail here, you and I are going to be held directly responsible unless we figure out a way to fix this, and I mean yesterday! And I’m not being poetic, we’re angels, we can totally do that.

I guess you could say I’ve got a monkey on my back. A monkey named Darwin.” He shrugged off the trench coat and there she was, clinging tightly to his shoulders. The hunch on his back wasn’t a hunch at all, but as fine a specimen of a female chimpanzee as I’m ever likely to see.