Two Half Melons

The worship began almost as soon as the Melon Halves were injected with the potent formaldehyde concoction. Everyone knew the world did not lack for deities. Nevertheless, there was an unmistakeable allure to the unchristened, immortal concavities of Honeydew that science had chosen, before anything else, to inoculate against mortality. You could certainly argue, and many did, that the real progenitor God was the scientific community, whose agents selected the Melon for the experiment. But this is akin to saying that the Judeo-Christian God was wrought by the men who wrote the bible. From the perspective of the devout this is blasphemy, and even from the perspective of the educated atheist does nothing to increase knowledge of the believer's real motives for his faith. We all knew that the real God was implicit in the mystique of the Melons Themselves, and the prevailing liturgy thus became a tale of causa sui: the Melon elected for Itself to be grown, harvested and shipped to the Santa Monica laboratory where scientists were busily conducting research on biomedical gerontology (life extension). Once there, the Melon invoked Its powers of grace to be positioned in the laboratory within arms reach of the experimenter who, being junior, was tasked in that moment to fetch something organic for his more senior colleague. Why was the Melon halved? Because the junior researcher had intended to consume It, of course. He'd just finished slicing the melon in two with his pocket knife, and was on the verge of piercing its (now) sacred fruity interior, when the urgent call from his colleague for a specimen came ringing through the intercom. The subsequent events have since become as canonized for Melonites as are the twelve stations of the cross for Christians, or the pilgrimage to Mecca for Muslims. The Fourteen Phases of Melonic Purification begin with four pre-injection moments, consisting of the Reluctant Lowering of the Knife, the Hoisting of the Melons, the Preliminary Migration, and the Arrival at the Site of Injection. These four moments are succeeded by the six moments of Holy Melonic Transformation: the Stationing of the Melons, the Angling of the Syringe, the Compression of the Syringe, the Contact of the Fluid to the Melonic Membranes, the Suffusion of the Fluid, and finally the Chemical Melonic Transcendence. The entire purification cycle is concluded with the following four moments: the Subsequent Migration to the Janitorial Closet, the Unknowing Profanation of the Melons before the Janitor, the Janitor's Retrieval of the Melons, the Melons Final Transmission to the World.

Those uninitiated into the melonic mysteries may find it difficult to entirely reconstruct the events that transpired from the the names of the Fourteen Phases alone, but the essential point to understand is that Science, in its capacity as the transmitter of immortality to the Melon Halves, chose to reject the Melons for some perceived imperfection. In doing so, they inadvertently positioned a single man, the Janitor Perry Winkleton, as the catalyst for Melonism's rapid ascendance. Science therefore beheld perfection, but either could not see it for what it was, or was even in full view of it ultimately dissatisfied. The Janitor, who is to Melonism what St. Paul was to Christianity, undermined the haughty indifference of the Scientific worldview with the clarity of uneducated humility. He perceived simply that the Melons were sacred and precious, and retrieved them from the garbage bin where they'd been thrown. Lovingly, he rinsed Them off and carried Them to the people so that Their truth could be experienced by everyone. It was Perry Winkleton who spoke out at the First Melonic Council against the sectarian desires of the new, self-titled Left and Right Melonists. These followers, though undeniably devout adherents to the Melons, came to wildly divisive conclusions about the respective qualities of each Half. Some records suggest that Science injected Immortality into the Left Melon before the Right Melon, thus undermining the legitimacy of their equality as manifestations of Godhead. The Right Melonists, by contrast, argue that the Second Injection illustrates a more perfect Transmission of Immortality, that the First Injection had to be repeated before the universe could fully acknowledge its occurrence. The Second Injection became thus the culmination, perfection, and unification of the Melons as the divided-yet-not-really-divided true God.

Perry Winkleton, however, rejected the notion of there being two Melons, which is to say in any sense of religious, spiritual, allegorical or anagogical significance. To prove his point he held the Melons aloft and hurled them at the gathered assembly, where rather than splattering apart they fused for a single moment, in mid air, into the Holy Perfect Melon, before coming to rest on the conference table as two separate halves. Thus for a time the Left versus Right Melonist division hid itself underground, and a new eschatology began to circulate that one day the Melons would reunite, thereby delivering lasting peace and nutrition to all the world. Perry Winkleton himself adopted this as the revealed doctrine of Melonism, and actively promoted its transmission to non-Melonists wherever he went. If anything proved to be Winkleton's undoing, it was his unabashed acceptance of all peoples into the folds of the Melon. His martyrdom was secured when a group of Melon separatists waylaid him with lead pipes on his way home from a Melonic Conference, and pulped his head in like a ripe melon. Despite Winkleton's murder, he was successful in preventing the inclusion of the First and Second Injections as additional phases in the Melonic Purification, which very quickly became canonized after his death. To this day, Melonists continue to await the coming to fruition of the Melon's Oneness, and wage a constant struggle against the temptation to devour Its Holy Juices by slicing out their tongues and pulling out their teeth. God Bless the Melons Halves, for Their Gifts Are Always Sweet and Come in Pairs.