I'm sitting at a sidewalk cafe table with a friend who's a naturalist. He jokes about the accuracy of an eagle's strike--"Why, she can snatch a sheep without troubling a hair on its friends' heads." Oh, I think they'd be troubled...

Mind what you joke about! You may make it real. A great winged shadow sweeps over the diner. Eagle wings... but the size of a small plane. And not an eagle body. A winged lion! Gryphon? Sphinx? Neither. A god! Aslan--the God of Narnia--but with eagle wings.

He stoops--shrieks down at us, two hundred miles an hour, to snatch his natural prey from the table by us. Who was having a quiet dinner with a date.

His date is why Aslan attacked. His interracial date! She's a zebra, and he's a giraffe. Well, was. And we can't have that. A mortal sin. Says Aslan.

Weirdly, this giant flier able to lift a half-ton giraffe doesn't even ruffle the hair of the diners at other close-packed tables. Weirdly, my naturalist friend is so busy fuming at the violation of physics, he can't see this cafe pounce-and-chomp just enacted his own joke.

With all of us playing the sheep. Sheep who don't rise up against this gorgeous, contemptible god.

• Aslan punishes "sinners": I just reread C.S. Lewis's Narnia books. In A Horse and his Boy, Aslan claws both Horse and Boy when they flee their slave-owners, to make them feel the pain other underlings will suffer for their freedom-break. Seriously? Is this Lewis's Christianity? Go claw the slavers, Aslan!
• My naturalist friend: almost certainly Mr. Tumnus, that polite, fussy satyr in the first Narnia book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
• Giraffe dates zebra: even as a kid, I doubted that talking horses would marry like naked apes. Wouldn't sexual bonds be brief, but friendships be paramount and permanent? And would none of the Narnians, of so many species, ever crossbreed?
• The Christian God hates interracial dating: literal! Oral Roberts University just banned interracial dating. C.S. Lewis was born in the 19th century, but what's Oral Roberts's excuse? What the hell century is this?

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