Celestial Flatulence

There was, in the beginning of time, nothing. Nothing, that is, except for a great black hole named Shart.

Shart had a nasty habit of sucking up the nothingness. He'd drink the Nothing of the cosmos like it was coffee. It got him up every morning, kept him going throughout the day.

Of course, Nothing was not a solid or a liquid, or even a gas. And Shart had a highly unique digestive system, one that could turn nothing into... something. Shart was unaware of the cosmic consequences of his consumption. It was merely an innocent dependency (the word addiction hadn't been invented yet) and he had no way of knowing that inside his gut, Nothing was beginning to solidify, to churn.

It happened on 0/0/0000. The Nothing day of the Nothing month of the Nothing year. Zero was, in fact, the first number (even if humans didn't figure it out at first).

0/0/0000 was the day that Shart's gut finally let loose its creation. It was loud, messy, violent. Shart couldn't sit down for three weeks afterwards (chairs were his first invention at the end of this three weeks.

Shart maybe should have been proud of creating the universe with his accidental feces, but he was not. In fact, he was bitterly disappointed. Nothing was his favorite food. Now there was no more Nothing.

He struggled to find a palatable substitute. He sampled planets, tasted galaxies, dined upon nebulas. None of it seemed to satisfy his cravings.

Until one day he tasted Light. Light was better than Nothing, and he ate it heartily.

With Light, he was able to create more things. And those things grew and changed and reproduced and made new things. Before, he had been the only creator. Now, it seemed, he had inadvertently created other creators.

He wondered once what his new, Light-infused creations would taste like.

The answer, he learned: they taste pretty dang good. He began to see a pattern: every 50-100 million years, species would begin to go downhill. Infighting, overpopulation... it was a mess. He took it upon himself to cleanse the world of these species every once and awhile. Until, of course, humans showed up. At first he was stunned by how advanced they were. He'd begun to view them as the perfect creation. He wouldn't need to kill them, because surely they wouldn't fall into the same pitfalls of those other, primitive animals.

He was wrong.

Not only did they fall, but they fell fast. What took other species millions of years took the humans a few hundred thousand. It was almost impressive how willing they were to drive themselves into the ground.

Still, Shart knew something had to be done. He knew there would come a time when he would have to eat the humans, just as he had eaten the species before them. But he wasn't sure if humans would even last for millions of years.

He ate several stars, but none of them seemed to fill him. His appetite was waning.

"I suppose," he mused to himself, "I may have to rush things a bit..."

He could feel more substance rolling in his bowels. Soon, a new creation would come into the world. And he had a great idea for what to name his upcoming prodigal son, His crown prince.

He would name it Corona.