Heavily inspired by @nathanielorion, here is ‘If Noah was a billionaire’
This is how it goes: The world rots. Violence hums in the soil like a live wire, leaking up through the soles of people’s shoes. Cities shiver with corruption, their rivers running metallic and foul. God looks down and His voice is a flood before the flood: I will drown it all. But you, Noah: you, I will save.
This is how it goes: Noah is rich. Not rich in goats or olive trees, instead in vaults and granaries and hidden cellars filled with gold. When God whispers, Build me a boat, Noah hears Build me a kingdom that floats. He hires his sons as labour, his daughters-in-law as servants, his brothers and cousins as thieves. Together they strip the markets clean, grain by grain, apple by apple, leaving families with hollow cupboards and empty palms.
God says, Two of each creature. Male and female. They will come to you.
And they do. The elephants arrive first, gray mountains with eyes like old sorrow. But Noah shakes his head. You’ll eat too much, he says, and bars the door.
Then the lions pad up, golden and hungry, their ribs like cage doors rattling in the wind. Noah feels the weight of their teeth in his mind. You’re dangerous, he says. You’ll eat me before the bread runs out.
The birds swirl in flocks, a storm of feathers and wings. They bow their beaks at his doorway. You can fly, Noah says. You don’t need me.
The pairs keep coming: striped, spotted, scaled, furred. Noah counts their hungers, their strangeness, their otherness. One by one he turns them away until the line dwindles to nothing. The ark, wide as a city block, yawns with empty cages.
This is how it goes: the rain begins. A drizzle first, then a roar. For forty days and forty nights the skies collapse, the seas swallow. Noah and his family sit dry inside their floating empire. They eat. They drink. They grow fat on what they stole. They laugh over the thunder.
Outside, the world drowns. The elephants sink heavy as stone. The lions thrash once, then vanish. The birds spiral higher, higher, until their wings collapse against the rain.
Months pass. The ark bumps against mountains. Noah has no raven to release and no dove to carry a leaf. The sky clears and there is silence.
This is how it goes: eventually the water sinks. Noah walks out onto dry ground. He breathes in emptiness. He has inherited a kingdom of dust. His covenant is with silence. His rainbow arcs across a sky with no eyes left to see it.