How has mankind managed to shackle itself to various forms of servitude, slavery, debasement and oppression over the ages?

Recently, while talking to a homeless couple at an East Baltimore bus stop, the author, James LaFond, discovered that their names were Jack and Jill, that they are 33,000 years old, and that they knew the ten answers to this ages old question! These two claimed to know everything about the enslavement of mankind, but soon fell into a violent argument over the fate of a piece of Sumerian crockery. Before he was able to finish his interview, Jack and Jill had been tazed, cuffed and dragged off in the back of a paddy wagon by responding Baltimore City police officers, leaving him to fill in the blanks as best he could.

Happily Ever Under is their story.

I shall be referencing a conversation—interview actually, though a messy one—I had this past winter at a bus stop with a homeless couple who insisted that they were Adam and Eve, and, among other things, were once a Neanderthal couple in love. They insisted these things despite of that fact that there names were Jack and Jill. I realize that they may have been playing me for bus fare, having found out I was a writer. But there was something that rang true about their claim to an eternally long relationship—rang, actually, in the form of Jill’s solid right hook to Jack’s jaw and his instinctive counter slap. Before long the police were dragging them off and there I was, with only a smattering of the true secret history of the sexes to reassemble from my notes scrawled on the back of a condom box and a handful of register receipts.

In any event, when a point on the time line of emergent civilization came up that Jack and Jill had not had time to relate in detail, I simply placed them there in my mind, as they had been at the bus stop on that windy trash-blown day, and relied on my historical reading of the period to flesh out that particular signpost of their extramillennial marriage.