Just as Newton was about to be executed, a ship appeared on the horizon, the mast rising the distance, rising and rising until it broke the earth's atmosphere and scattered into up, down, strange, charmed, top, and bottom quarks, the solidarity of which was questioned by a party of antiquarks, which came to replace the Communist party. This "redshift" indicated that the universe was expanding. Hence Newton abandoned his faith entirely and converted into helium, gravity straining against his combustion enough to maintain a sense of equilibrium. 

On a moonlit stroll, while crossing the Einstein-Rosen bridge, Newton's water pail broke and the moon disappeared. He stopped for a moment and considered his reflection, noticing how the light breeze and dying moonlight converged for a moment to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics, then vanished under a contract dispute (the mechanics demanded more breaks between redshifts). Beneath the bridge, a river of light rushed by in waves, then particles, then waves. From above, the last glimpse of the moon's decay resembled a sickle, cradling the constellation of a hammer, poised over a flask of acid, next to a cat. The cat was thought to be chasing a string, though this string theory is still conjecture (as is the cradle). 

When Newton blinked, his head collapsed. In this instant, the vasomotor shock combined with low blood pressure to provoke a surge of cached recollections that were originally imprinted as a resurgence from a momentary perceptual dampening. He remembered. He remembered the cooling, the attraction, the yawning expanse and coalescence all resigned to reverse narration, film slipping from the reel, fluttering and unraveling the lives of protons, neutrons, and electrons back to their cosmic wombs, now photons fleeing like jaded lovers, doors slamming so hard that the friction against the changed locks sparked back into radiation and sighed in atomic refrain, curled up like a child scolded for poor math grades, and hid inside a singularity, dense and lonely. 

Newton's severed finger is now in a jar in Rome, pointing toward the Vatican. His ashes were baked into fig bars and sold on auction to benefit ALS. Newton's best-selling book, Paradise Lost, has been translated into 17 languages, converted into pure energy, and adapted as a Broadway musical. He is the only known orphan in the universe.