351 Memoirs of Eddie H. Christ, Jesus' Little Brother: Star of Bethlehem

Jesus, although the son o’God, was also made up of the same star stuff everyone else is.

Look, you’ve got carbon, oxygen, zinc, iron, and a lot of other stuff in you. But God didn’t make any of that in the beginning. In fact, the Big Bang resulted mainly in a lot of hydrogen and heat—eventually. And no heavier elements at first. So how do we have bodies based on carbon, blood that has iron-based hemoglobin carrying oxygen, cellulose for wood, Boswellia for frankincense, and a shitload of myrrh? How'd we get from just a bunch of hydrogen to all of this other stuff that made up life as we knew it?

"Gravity,"Jesus said. He was a big fan of gravity—that mysterious bending of space-time that causes objects to fall together and lots of hydrogen to glob together over time. In fact, he bent space-time himself to pull off his miracles. "It's easy," he said, "if you knew how to mess with Higgs particles, gravitons, and supersymmetry."

Whatever those were.

The more all of this hydrogen fell together, the denser these globs got. The denser they got, the more the gravity. When the density and pressure were enough, hydrogen atoms woud fuse together into helium.

“One day,” Jesus said, “there'll be something called the periodic table which many people will pretend to understand.”

"When hydrogen fused into helium," he said, "poets would call this ignition; with it, a star was born."

The structure of a star's a peculiar thing—a great big ball of gas that gravity wants to press down on, but it’s kept puffed up so nicely because it’s a frickin’ nuclear bomb that’s always blowing outward. Jesus said that it was a balance allowing a long lifespan.

If the hydrogen fuel ran out, the force of the constant nuclear ignition wasn’t enough to blow back all of the star that wanted to collapse upon itself. When gravity wins and things go crunch, you can’t tell whether it’s an explosion or an implosion.

Especially if you’re standing nearby.

If it really had been a star the Magi thought they were following, then their star wasn't any different. Wise? They didn't have a clue.

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AUTHOR'S NOTES:

For Monday, December 16, Day 351 of the 2024 Story-a-Day Challenge.

366 WORDS (without A/N)

ONLY 15 DAYS TO GO! THE STORIES KEEP COMING LIKE PRESENTS ON IN THIS 2024 STORY-A-DAY VOCAL CHALLENGE.

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AMONG THEM 2024 HAS SEEN PUBLISHED OVER A THOUSAND UNIQUE, DAILY MICROFICTIONS. NOT TOO SHABBY.