Bible Stories for Adults Read Free Page A

want to see your brothers,” she tells him.
    â€œWhat?” Ham touches his throat, reopening his fine, subtle wound.
    â€œShem and Japheth also have their parts to play.”
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C APTAIN’S L OG . 24 J ULY 1057 A.C.
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Our dinghy is missing. Maybe the whore cut it loose before she was executed. No matter. This morning I launched a dove, and it has returned with a twig of some kind in its beak. Soon our sandals will touch dry land.
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My sons elected to spare me the sight of the whore’s corpse. Fine. I have beheld enough dead sinners in my six centuries.
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Tonight we shall sing, dance, and give thanks to Yahweh. Tonight we shall bleed our best lamb.
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    The world is healing. Cool, smooth winds rouse Sheila’s hair, sunlight strokes her face. Straight ahead, white robust clouds sail across a clear sky.
    A speck hovers in the distance, and Sheila fixes on it as she navigates the boundless flood. This sign has appeared none too soon. The stores from
Eden II
will not last through the week, especially with Sheila’s appetite at such a pitch.
    Five weeks in the dinghy, and still her period has not come. “And Ham’s child is just the beginning,” she mutters, tossing a wry smile toward the clay pot. So far, the ice shows no sign of melting; Shem and Japheth’s virtuous fertilizer, siphoned under goad of lust and threat of death, remains frozen. Sheila has plundered enough seed to fill all creation with babies. If things go according to plan, Yahweh will have to stage another flood.
    The speck grows, resolves into a bird. A
Corvus corax
, as the old man would have called it.
    Sheila will admit that her designs are grand and even pompous. But are they impossible? She aims to found a proud and impertinent nation, a people driven to decipher ice and solve the sun, each of them with as little use for obedience as she, and they will sail the sodden world until they find the perfect continent, a land of eternal light and silken grass, and they will call it what any race must call its home, Formosa, beautiful.
    The raven swoops down, landing atop the jar of sperm, and Sheila feels a surge of gladness as, reaching out, she takes a branch from its sharp and tawny beak.

Daughter Earth
    W E’D BEEN TRYING to have another child for over three years, carrying on like a couple from one of those movies you can rent by going behind the beaded curtain at Jake’s Video, but it just wasn’t working out. Logic, of course, says a second conception should prove no harder than a first. Hah. Mother Nature can be a sneaky old bitch, something we’ve learned from our twenty-odd years of farming down here in central Pennsylvania.
    Maybe you’ve driven past our place, Garber Farm, two miles outside of Boalsburg on Route 322. Raspberries in the summer, apples in the fall, Christmas trees in the winter, asparagus in the spring—that’s us. The basset hound puppies appear all year round. We’ll sell you one for three hundred dollars, guaranteed to love the children, chase rabbits out of the vegetable patch, and always appear burdened by troubles greater than yours.
    We started feeling better after Dr. Borealis claimed he could make Polly’s uterus “more hospitable to reproduction,” as he put it. He prescribed vaginal suppositories, little nuggets of progesterone packed in cocoa butter. You store them in the refrigerator till you’re ready to use one, and they melt in your wife the way M & Ms melt in your mouth.
    That very month, we got pregnant.
    So there we were, walking around with clouds under our feet. We kept remembering our son’s first year out of the womb, that sense of power we’d felt, how we’d just gone ahead and thought him up and made him, by damn.
    Time came for the amniocentesis. It began with the ultrasound technician hooking Polly up to the TV monitor so Dr. Borealis could keep his syringe on target and make sure it