Scatological, Theological, Same Difference

An anecdote that has the power to make you believe way more, or way less, in heaven and hell. Like everything else in life, the secret is perspective. Time for you to find out what yours is.

SYNOPSIS

A parent overhears his two boys, "Bobby" and "Dave," in the prime of their poop-joke-making days, discussing the afterlife.

CHAPTER ONE (frankly, it's the only chapter)

9:30 on a lazy summer night: bedtime. Bobby, age nine and full of the evening's desperate energy, seized his toothbrush and began to carelessly coat it in toothpaste. Swirls of magenta, white and teal trickled down the bristles at an impossibly slow speed, like a family of mismatched neon slugs.
Bobby's younger brother, Dave, stood at the toilet, giggling while relieving himself. Not an uncommon multitasking activity for the wiggly and precocious six-year-old.
"I used to think that when we died," Bobby said, "if we were bad, we went to a place that was all poop."
Dave giggled, flushed, and started on his own teeth-brushing mission. "And all pee!" he added.
Bobby paused his tooth-brushing long enough to chuckle, then disagree with the younger boy. "No, just everything was made of poop, even the houses."
"Even the food!" Dave chimed in.
"Well, maybe you had to drink pee."
"And the rain could be pee."
"Ewwwwww. Gross." Laughter.
"Ewwwwww." Snickers.
More toothbrushing ensued. Bobby finished first, which allowed him to expound on his earlier point:
"And if we were good, we went to a place where everything was made of gold." 
Dave, not terribly interested in the living conditions of a golden paradise, spit and circled back to the scatological portion of the story.
"And you would drive around in poop cars..."
"It would be so stinky all the time," said Bobby, and the treatise on an afterlife replete with bodily functions would no doubt have gone on for a while, had the boys' father, Jon, not stepped in.
"Finish up guys if you want a chance to read before lights out. And keep the poop talk confined to the bathroom."

THE END (curtain)

You don't need me to spell out the reasons why that anecdote's capable of reinforcing OR threatening the concepts of heaven and hell. And I won't. I'll just say that fire and brimstone no longer sounds like the worst  everlasting punishment ever devised.

The story, obviously, is zero percent fictional. In fact, it's barely an hour old. The names haven't even been adequately changed to protect the guilty parties. Sorry for all the poop.