Ed Higgins

Noah’s Redolent Ark 

 

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OMG! It’s rained 40 days and 40 nights. Everyone’s cranky as hell. Despite its mammoth size the Ark’s rocking back and forth like a flat-bottomed WWII landing craft. Stinking pee-soaked manure’s piling up faster than Shem, Ham, and Japheth can schlepp it topside in oaken wooden buckets. Two buckets at a time, one on each end of a milkmaid’s yoke, climbing slippery below-deck ladders to heave endless tons of all-the-world’s-confined-animals’ waste over the side. 

 

Upper deck bulwarks were built with scuppers fore and aft to drain off any invading waves overlapping the Ark. But the upper deck’s now overlapped with paired feral birds roosting everywhere. There’s slippery bird shit over every inch of the port and starboard gangways, sheeting off the Ark’s roof in the incessant rain. Using a long-handled squeegee someone twice daily sluices the muck toward the scuppers—occasionally clogged with dead birds. Shem, Ham, and Japheth trade-off on who gets this easier upper deck cleaning job. What they laughingly refer to as the poop deck. At least there’s no endlessly schlepping yoked poop buckets up here. 

 

Stall-escaped apex predators are an occasional problem. But a plentitude of sheep, goats, and other clean beasts keep them reasonably in check. A tasty bleating sheep or goat teasing them back to their barred stalls. Actually, the pair of escaped T-Rexes were a potent blessing. Noah had anticipated desperate folk trying to board the Ark. He was especially fearful of a boarding party by the Giant sons of God, Nephilim, demonstrably wicked for their inter-breeding with human women. A transgression that totally pissed God off, leading to his regret for ever creating humankind in the first place. Time to cream the whole damn earth for their violence and wickedness. Who could blame Him? Turns out only eight people in the whole creation are worth salvaging. Also a selection of two of every bird, beast, and creeping thing—fish and watery others on their own.

 

Noah’s too old to help much at anything. He’s particularly cranky his 600th birthday was spoiled by animal stink and piss-to-shit tides sloshing even the upper deck in this incessant rocking. Sewage seeping into their living quarters through cracks Noah accuses his sons of forgetting to properly pitch-caulk in their hurry to build this damn monster of a floating every-animal-on-earth zoo! 

 

This morning at breakfast he grumbled that his bed clothes were sopping wet despite his top deck cabin, for Chrissake! The sons joke about their old man bedwetting at his advanced age. Or maybe it was that incontinent old salukis, Sala, he loves so much he lets sleep on his bed, despite wife Naamah’s displeasure. As she bewails to her three daughters-in-law. These three women refuse to do manure-schlepping with their husbands: Look, we’re all pregnant here, do you want miscarriages from our slipping and falling on shit-slick decks or while mucking out piled-high stalls with kicking giraffes? Maybe gored by that pair of horned Cape buffalo? My god, even the pygmy hippo pair are vile-tempered enough to knock you down in their pen’s slop. Besides, who’s doing the cooking around here? Who’s keeping our living quarters at least barely livable? Just this morning a pair of pterodactyls came flapping through the kitchen! Scaring hell out of us all crashing about, Sala crawling under the table whimpering. Finally managed to shoo them out one of the kitchen windows swinging brooms and ladles. But they left dactyl shit from floor to counter tops, broken crockery scattered about. Guess who cleaned up that foul mess! 

 

The earth drank water until it bloated. Drowned humanity and animal carcasses bobbing between lapping waves and rising waters. Bumping more than frequently against the Ark’s sides. Some nights it’s hard to sleep through the thud-thudding. So many corpses the Ark’s often dead in the water, unable to move through the fetid, creepy flotsam. The stench outside is more overpowering then even the piling-up creatures’ piss/shit. All around the deluged Ark bloated death floating. Some days a gulp of reeking air has you throwing up whatever meal you last ate. 

 

Initially there were pleading cries for rescue: babies held aloft in desperate mothers’ arms while clinging to floating debris (or as in Doré’s “The Deluge” doomed men, women, and children beset by waves sweeping a jutting-out rock as the Ark recedes in the distance). All Noah’s neighbors, or merely strangers, finally giving way to silence and bloating stench. Finally, only the constant thrum of pelting rain on the Ark’s roof and cries of panicked onboard animals.  

 

Fat-bellied Sharks everywhere frothing the waters, gorging themselves at first, eventually stupefied. Sated with excess. The pair of vultures at first sat on the railings dripping gore in abundance. But they too became overfed flying out regularly to rafts of floating corpses: standing on massed, twisted bodies glutting on putrid flesh. Like kids at a birthday party after too much cake and ice cream they soon became lethargic, overfed to discomfort. Mostly they sat perched on the railings watching the endless floating carrion. Sick at heart at such unreasonable waste. When hunger returned, as inevitably it did over the long sojourn, their feasting continued on waters awash with carrion.

 

A hundred and fifty days later God, back from a long latté break, remembers: Oh yeah, I destroyed my damn misbehaving Creation. Sans Noah and his Ark’s shitload of two by two creatures. Gotta lol at that salvation plan! But the downpour smiting needs stopping so things can get back to fruitful and multiply once again. And so it does. After five months of rising water the restless animals and Noah’s extended family hie it to dove-signaled dry ground. The Ark’s pair of praying mantis, who’d spent an enormous amount of time praying for the survival of all on board, felt their prayers had been answered. 

 

Noah goes into the wine business. But he’s naked and drunk in his tent much of the time with post-traumatic-flood-syndrome. Finally dying at 950 years old, with Sala whimpering at his bedside.     

Can’t Say, Really  

 

Hmmm. . . . can’t really say, I say. And to tell you the truth (Actually, I’m probably not. Telling her the truth, that is.) Who knows what truth is anyway? I pontificate. Well, as I pontificate further, it’s as if “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum, at #57 on the Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” should really be #1. Ok, Mr. Rock & Roll smartass, she says, where’s this song analogy bullshit going to anyway? Her dark blue eyes rolling back in her head as she reaches across the small faux green-granite table where we’re sitting in an off-campus coffee shop, patting my left hand affectionately. Thinking I’m maybe on a roll, I quote her a line:

 

But the crowd called out for more 

The room was humming harder 

As the ceiling flew away 

 

Obviously, I say. Joy’s now rolling her eyes like she’s having a fit or something. Ok, see, it’s like those suet cakes—I’m not as amused as she wants with her rolling eyes act— it’s like those suet cakes you hang out for the birds in winter. Solidified fat embedded with millet and assorted black sunflower seeds. All kinds of birds love it, right? Right, she agrees, indulging me. But staring cross-eyed now.

 

Truth’s like that, don’t you see? All of us different birdbrains pecking at the great TRUTH SUET out in life’s nasty cold and rain. Or pulling up juicy TRUTH WORMS sometimes in the dog days of summer. Ok, that’s a mixed metaphor of sorts. Joy’s smiling haughtily, having caught me even confessing to my mashed-up metaphors. It all depending on the size and shape of our inquiring bird beaks (allegory here, all right?), I continue. We extract small bits, or sometimes larger chunks, of, yes, TRUTH. Yet the suet-holder-of-mystery, not to mention inadequate language, is designed to impede the struggle to extract those existential shards of necessary TRUTH. 

 

I’m Cheshire-smiling back at her now. I go on, No more philosophies, no religions, no reality TV, no brainless sitcoms like Glee, no all-night college dorm bullshit sessions, no need for bartenders’ influence on society, Starbucks would never roast another bean, nothing at all to keep all our human shit going. Pausing, now, for a significant sip of my latté. She’s thinking about this, smiling lightly. Ok, so I haven’t thoroughly worked out my TRUTH metaphor/parable entirely, I grudgingly confess. She smiles steadily, quotes back “A Whiter Shade of Pale” line to me:  

 

She said, "There is no reason 

And the truth is plain to see." 

 

Yeah, very funny, I say. And you’re rolling your lovely, clever blue eyes at me again. Fine, fine. A love game we play. She’s smiling wryly, like she always does when I get on my philosophical high horseshit. She takes a coy sip of her chai. When we were undergrads she hated the philosophy course we took together, sharing a textbook. In turn I hated the biology course we took together. She could draw a better amoeba than in our damn $175 textbook. 

 

Whatever, I now say, (overreaching for another metaphor): TRUTH’s a blind juggler tossing pin-pulled hand grenades in the air while walking a tightrope stretched between NYC’s once-there-but-now-gone twin towers. Before somebody’s shit-for-brains TRUTH drove jetliners into them. But, as in juggling grenades, mesmerized, we fail to notice the pins are pulled and the whole fucking entertainment is about to blow us into irrational spatters of IGNORANCE! at any contingent moment. I fall back on Procol Harum: 

 

I pointed out this detail

And forced her to agree, 

 

Caution at one’s own IGNORANCE, I push to conclude, ought to attend our most earnest pronouncements. She agrees, nodding her head, lovely smile fully attending. Caution seldom does however, we both agree. I decide she’s caught beyond loving nods and smiles at my overwhelming philosophical wisdom and somewhat skillful analogies and metaphors. Joy, as I’ve noticed in our long, sweet relationship likes slowly transforming my syntax and sentences into the blithe color of enlightenment, like piano notes rising to the sun. 

 

You are so ego-testical full-of-yourself-shit, she finally says, catching at last her tongue’s amused path.

 

Ok, right, I say, possibly to no avail, but look, maybe TRUTH’s just knowing with its sleeves turned inside out—I’m stretching now for a stupid-to-foolish fashion analogy. Or say your shirt buttoned up the back like women’s blouses used to. Then, if you only keep walking backward long enough, peeking carefully over your shoulder, you’ll still get nowhere philosophically. I’m speak elliptically, not willing to lose her essential love-smile. 

 

Anyway, you are way sooooooo vaginocentric! I say, smiling back at her with all of myself.

 

So, when all is said and done then we’re buttoned-up dead, is that it? she says, imitating my best elliptical-philosophical voice. 

 

Probably even before all is said and buttoned-up, I reply, imitating my best giving-in shrug-smile. Later that afternoon we make over-the-top smiling love. That evening we go to a chick-flick. And I’m humming between mouthfuls of buttered popcorn:

 

That her face, at first just ghostly, 

Turned a whiter shade of pale.

 

Ed Higgins' poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals including recently: Ekphrastic Review, CarpeArte Journal, Under the Basho, Statement Magazine, and Tigershark Magazine, among others. Ed is Professor Emeritus, English Dept., and Writer-in-Residence at George Fox University. He is also Asst. Fiction Editor for Brilliant Flash Fiction. Ed has a small organic farm in Yamhill, OR, raising a menagerie of animals—including a rooster named StarTrek and a male whippet named Mr. Toffee.

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