When he had worked on his son's countenance for a while, says the tail, he looked at his appalling work, noticing that the result was almost optimal. But once he had backed one step and accurately scrutinized it, he found it, by disregarding the 'optimal' and concentrating on the 'almost', quite mediocre, due to the fact that this undefined degree of something possesses the annoying faculty to corrupt everything else (except a few things that he is not interested in). In order to dodge the nuisance, the devil reconsidered his task, asking himself in a loud, handsome voice:

"And what if I, just out of caprice, made him beautiful instead? For what is the difference between beauty and ugliness? Are they not both ruled by 'almost', being that which is 'almost beautiful', 'almost ugly' as well?"

Having uttered these words, and being impressed by their cleverness, he proceeded to erase, while ceaselessly wagging his tail, all the ugliness he could from his son's face, and started to embellish him instead. And being both ingenious and deft (so the tail asserts), he turned, in one instant, the nauseous face into a gorgeous one. Or indeed almost gorgeous; for looking at his son from several angles, he verified, with his habitual exactitude, what he already knew: namely, that 'almost' keeps always company with most other things, and that, regardless of his efforts, he would at any time, only obtain 'almost beautiful' or 'almost ugly', which are practically the same. "That must be a side effect of relativity", he reflected, smiling with condescension at his own wisdom.

Acting in accordance with his insight, he then resolved to bend this state of affairs, as if it were a portion of space or a beam of light, and make a fresh attempt. And when he noticed that 'almost' still refused to submit, he tried yet again, and again, changing his son's face back and forth, from beautiful to ugly, and from ugly to beautiful, a thousand times, or perhaps a thousand and one, or maybe infinite times. For not even his gossiping tail could tell how many were the times the devil changed his son's looks, although both he and his tail can count everything with extreme accuracy whenever they wish.

In one of these instances (the last to be precise), while the devil was either bettering or worsing the make-up, he suddenly gouged, with nails sharp like knives, his son's eyeballs from their sockets. Such things happen! Feeling that his boldness was now beginning to surpass his dexterity, he came, as he picked the eyeballs up, into his infinitesimal mood, and as a result he hammered the floor with his tail with such pressure and speed, that he turned it into a singularity, that is: he degraded it to 'project of a floor'. This accomplishment, we learn, filled the tail with cosmic pride, even though its master had wished also her to turn into such a singularity, remaining for ages as a mere 'project of a tail', instead of hanging around so closely.

Now, from one angle (the devil has many angles, says the proud tail), the eyes-issue was not a problem. But from another, this was a serious matter; for now that the eyes were separated from the make-up, he could no longer exhibit the whole dashing picture, and thereby let his son feel as proud as the sticky tail. He would have instead to start from the very beginning, which is like becoming infinitely dense, a state capable of overwhelming anyone through the deprivation of both time and relativity. "And although both relativity and time might cause irritation, that's everything we got", he persuasively told himself; "...or almost", he rectified with vague apprehension just to feel safer. But since despair borders on revelation, it was then that a deep insight opened before him as if it were the gate of his very home, unveiling the familiar landscape of an optimal solution which he promptly implemented: he put the eyeballs inside a transparent box and, having glued it at the top of his son's head, he laid a card beside with the devote caption:

"The eyes originally covered the holes beneath." "Now the world will see...", he said with his handsome voice. "Almost...", corrected the fastidious tail, "...your son won't".

Carlos Parada
Lund, May 2001