It was a siege, but no one was in danger of starvation.

The city’s walls shuddered as meatballs slammed into them. Between the catapults and the walls, tendrils of semolina five feet thick snaked through the mud and bodies to worry at the foundations of the same walls. Soldiers hacked at them, slowing the assault, but we were too few. Too many had been unable to resist the succulent bits of pasta and herbed meat and now lay on the field in comas of digestion. Only the sounds of digestion: gurgles and escaping gas let us know they were alive. Then, of course, they exploded from the gas pressure as the pasta fermented faster than any human could digest it. It was getting hard to tell the gore from the marinara.

We thought we’d made up the The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Pastafarianism was a damn parody after all. We laughed. We had caps and mugs and tshirts.

Shit, were we surprised when a deific-sized plate of spaghetti flattened Paris, covered Europe, Asia and Africa and then came for the Americas.