Look Noah—sorry, DAD—you knowst I’m your biggest fan. Not even naming me Ham could change that. (Quite the moniker for a chubby Jewish middle-born son, but whatever. I’m not complaining.)
All I’m saying is that we’re sick of being on this Ark. It’s been thirty-eight days and it’s time to get the hell off.
I was just watching Fox, the one with swirls for eyes and a white-tipped tail, and he’s saying it’s all a hoax. That mewing and hawing you’re hearing on the upper deck isn’t the 4 PM slop feeding. It’s a protest! See that weasel dipping an osprey feather into a bucket of goat shit? He’s writing 666 on the side of that elephant. The mark of the Beast, Dad! And that hippo? He’s got FARK THE ARK graffitied on his side in tiger urine. The imbecile sweethearts can’t spell, but they have a point. We have to keep the Ark free of teereny. We aren’t prizners. It’s time to Leebarate the Rrrrk.
I know your beloved dove, Lenny, a total peacenik commie lefty by the way, is supposedly going to scout dry land and bring back an olive branch from one of his flyover missions (flyover—so insulting!) as soon as it stops pouring, but if you ask me it’s barely drizzling at this point. The earthenware jugs gathering brackish water on deck show that the storm peaked a couple days ago already. Maybe we all just need to deal with getting a little wet so we can get started on this horticultural society you’ve been rambling on about. So what if we lose some small percent of the Beasts to drowning? If they’re that weak of swimmers we don’t want them in the first place. I don’t care what anyone says, including God. It’s over. Time to get ashore to start multiplying and replenishing.
Need I remind you that the future of animal and human civilization depends on us? Let’s crank some sexy lutes so these brutes can get to banging out more brutes. I for one wouldn’t mind skewering and roasting some of our tenderest brethren. Stale dates are not a meal, no matter how much expired mead you sop them in. I had a vision whilst staring at the hen coop the other day and it’s safe to say I’m off the whole vegetarian kick. You’re not the only one who has been having weird prophetic daydreams now that we all have way too much time on our hands and limited ingredients. Lenny would be great as a popper, right?
It’s not that I’m blowing off the seriousness of the Flood. Not at all! It’s just that the downside of staying on the Ark, drowning in quokka farts, is far greater than the downside of risking a premature exit and actually drowning like the rest of man- and animalkind. It’s like the saying goes: when God shuts off an existential firehose, he instantly opens a port of safe harbor because we’re his Chosen people. And it’s not like a little water is the scariest form God’s wrath could take. Like, is a gazillion-gallon deluge really that different from a seasonal spring shower? The Lord wouldn’t bring us this far from Galilee just to let us perish. Much like hope and Babylonians, we’ll float for a shocking amount of time!
I don’t want you to think I’m not grateful for the heads up re: damnation. It’s been unbelievably gratifying to see the bloody sins of humanity washed away to a person (with the exception of my two brothers, your precious Shem and Japheth). And thank you for packing so much wine and so many figs! We haven’t exactly been able to make a grocery run since the Fountains of the Great Deep broke apart, ha!
I know it’s classic middle-child of me to point out what a Godsend I’ve been. It’s just that it happens to be true. When you said all the people on earth were evil and deserved to die in a flood courtesy of the Big Man Upstairs, did I wail and shake? No. I waterproofed our keffiyehs with dried honey and started calling you Captain. From God’s lips to your mouth, I said. When you told us kids to repenteth and build an Ark, I wasn’t like, What’s an Ark? What’s a cubit? Unlike some other members of humanity, who shall remain nameless (cough cough Shem Japheth, goodness, bless me), I wasted no time questioning your sanity or calling the Ark you envisioned “stupid nonsense” (direct quote from Shem). This isn’t about favoritism or personal retribution. It’s about carpentry, pure and simple. Undoubtedly, my brothers’ buffoonery with hammer and nails will be carefully omitted from the ship’s log or whatever humble documentation will one day chronicle our waterborne epoch. Fox says you just can’t trust scribes these days to pass on the Truth.
You proclaimed, “Flood!” and your dearest Ham cried, “To prevail over beast and sky!”
Everyone and everything was going to die but us, your fam. Fine. Hallelujah. Rather than freak my freak, I figured out how to get us all safely quarantined on an epic floating zoo. Need I remind you (and I probably do, given how much you were imbibing at the time) that after building the Ark, I gathered grains and two of each animal and got them to wait patiently in line to board? Do you know how hard it is to make a hyena wait patiently in line? And I don’t mean to pat my own back, but take a guess at who is responsible for saving those reeking quokkas. Again, if several of those creatures, including Lenny, have to die to get the world back on track, that’s a small price to pay. The floating-zoo cure can’t be worse than the Flood cancer.
You’re absolutely right that the waters are still rising—inside the Ark! Now is probably a good time to tell you that Fox and I took the courtesy of gnawing a few holes in the hull before our chat. We’ll drown, you say? Pshaw. Everyone’s a cursed oceanographer now. Well, I’m a topographer: I swear I saw the tops of mountains the other day. Perfect location for a club-and-hole sport that will one day be called miniature golf. You need to get over the idea that you’re the only Savior onboard. Building your Ark saved us. Now it’s my job to save us again by allowing us to disembark.
LIBERATION! FARK THE ARK!