God sat on a rock, head in heavenly hands, and looked down at the ground. “I’m bored,” he muttered to no one in particular, for, as he came later to realize, he had not yet Created, thereby rendering non-existent the act of conversation. (God was lonely. A supreme loneliness, the first of its long and vaunted history.) “How absurdly boring this all is,” he whispered. His mouth suddenly turned itself into an unknown shape. He had never frowned before and found that he liked it less than smiling and laughing, of which he had previously done much.

He lifted his head and propped it up on his fist. Raising his other hand to his face, he observed the tiny hairs that clustered around the knuckles and the wrinkles that formed around each joint. “Not bad,” he thought. “Not bad at all. Functional yet aesthetically pleasing, perfect for climbing, eating, building, writing, and playing the piano.” (God was a forward thinker, even then. He had most everything planned out at the Big Bang and just added the final touches as they occurred to him.) “Wonderful model for figure drawing and also handy in bowling, sculpting, fencing, hunting, and playing cards. All in all, my best invention yet.”

The hand was grand, yes, and had taken him several days (days of Creation, much longer and more strenuous than the regular days that would eventually follow) to make, plan, model and eventually build. He viewed his entire corporeal form with a certain degree of pride, his first genuine creation and the catalyst for all that would follow. He planned out the earth and all its included features according to the limits and needs, the abilities and adaptations capable in the body he had created. It was the pinnacle of his budding creative genius.

But he also knew, in the deepest part of his deific psyche capable of judgment and damnation, the part that would eventually (with the involuntary help of a few unlucky souls) pen the Old Testament, knew, in the harshest sense of the word, that his invention was incomplete. It just wasn’t there yet.

In a quick flash of genius, he raised his hand again and with the tip of the pointer finger, he touched it. Instantaneously, it was transformed into a precise instrument capable of tiny movements and infinitesimal flexibilities. The addition a small finger, pointed in a different direction from all the others and stuck haphazardly on the side, had forever changed the course of existence and survival, and God knew it. “The thumb, I’ll call it. Rhymes with tongue, sort of, has that silent ‘b’ sound, it’s perfect. Thumb!” God rolled the word around on his tongue a few times, testing out its sound, its weight, its heft, but then stopped. He felt a bit foolish, but he realized no one else was there to observe. “Thumb thumb thumb thumb thumb thumb! I have created thumb!” he cried. “Now I can finally hold my tennis racket!”