Genesis Read online

  “Fine, Jesus... How about this? I’ll get the animals on board, you just build the fucking thing.”

  “And once they’re on board? What’s to stop them all from eating each other?”

  “Just leave that to me, alright.”

  So Noah gets to work building the ark. Him and his sons are cutting down trees, sawing them to length and nailing everything together. Once the hull’s done, they paint the entire thing inside and out with pitch to make it watertight.

  A couple of times, they’re visited by local farmers who ask them what they’re doing building a boat in the middle of a desert. They play it off like they’re just building a big, boat-shaped house and the farmers leave thinking they’re crazy, hurling insults. Noah tells his boys not to retaliate – they’ll be watching those people struggle to keep their heads above water soon enough.

  Meanwhile, God’s out on safari with a tranquilizer gun, shooting two of every animal and dragging them back to where Noah’s building the ark. The whole time, he’s muttering under his breath, complaining, “Fucking Noah, lazy piece of shit, making me do all the work, fucking prick...”, and so on.

  Finally, all the animals are loaded and the ark is stocked with enough food to last a year. God says it shouldn’t be longer than a year, and if it is, they can just start eating the animals. But also, the tranquilizers will start to wear off after twelve months, so at least it’ll be a fair fight.

  When Noah goes to argue, God tells him to relax, he’s kidding, they’ll be back on dry land within a year.

  Probably.

  Anyway, pretty soon, Noah and his family are on board and the flood begins. Him, his wife, his sons (Shem, Ham and Japheth) and his sons’ wives.

  Quick sidebar...

  Remember how the earth is in a bubble in a puddle in God’s backyard?

  Well, basically what God does is he opens a hole in the top of the bubble so water can pour in from the top, and another hole in the bottom so the sea levels can rise. As you can imagine, this’ll gradually fill the bubble until there’s only a tiny little air pocket for the ark to drift around in.

  Basically, he’s turning back the clock to when the puddle was just a puddle.

  And we’re back in...

  As water begins to lap against the hull, Noah’s family starts to hear knocking on the outside of the boat. It’s those pesky farmers again – only this time, they’re begging to be let in.

  Noah doesn’t say anything. He just smiles and looks at his boys, like, “See? Told you.”

  And they’re like, “Yeah, dad, listening to people’s desperate cries for mercy is awesome, and totally not sadistic and cruel and fucked up. They definitely deserve to die in one of the most horrific ways possible because they gently teased you about building a boat in the middle of a desert. They were crazy to call you out for that.”

  But they don’t say that, because apparently their dad is deriving some sick pleasure from all the people who are gathering outside, banging on the door, screaming for help. They’re afraid if they say anything, he’ll throw them out to join the crowd.

  So they wait.

  Slowly, the waters rise. Noah forces his family to go up to the roof and look down at all the people treading water below. He then whips out his penis and urinates over the side onto their heads, laughing as he does it.

  He forces his wife and his sons and his sons’ wives to do the same, so they’re all up there, pissing on the drowning farmers. You’d think the farmers might move away, but no, they stay there and take it. At first, everyone who isn’t Noah tries to tell the farmers they’re sorry, but Noah says, “No, don’t apologise. Laugh. Laugh!”

  And as if to provide an example, he laughs maniacally as he continues what has to be the longest piss in history. So now they’re all pretending to laugh, but with tears running down their faces, while the people down below tread water and urine, begging them to stop.

  Needless to say, dinner’s pretty quiet that night – except, of course, for the gentle splashing of the few remaining swimmers who no longer have the energy to scream.

  Noah’s got a small, contented smile on his face, like Andy Dufresne on the roof of that factory in The Shawshank Redemption.

  Right about now, you’re probably thinking, “Hold on...isn’t Noah supposed to be the good guy in all this? Isn’t that why he was chosen to live?”

  Yeah, about that...

  So a while back, Noah overhears a couple of angels talking about how God’s gearing up to wipe out the whole planet.

  How did he overhear them?

  Before I get to that, I should mention that at the time, Noah wasn’t quite so righteous. He’d fucked his way through half the village and come to blows with the other half. He’d crippled a man who he thought had stolen his good knife (which he later found under his pillow), and abused his liver enough to qualify for whatever the biblical equivalent of ‘town drunk’ was.

  One night, after retaining this esteemed title in a chugging contest, Noah finds himself on the floor of the tavern, slipping in and out of consciousness. Nearby, these two angels are having a beer, shooting the shit. They’re talking quiet, but they think that Noah’s out cold, so not quiet enough.

  One of the angels, Uriel (or Uri for short), says that God’s looking for a righteous man to be the next Adam and kick-start Humanity 2.0. But so far, he hasn’t had any luck, and instead, he’s just going to kill everyone.

  So, in the morning, Noah wakes up with a hangover and a sense of purpose, which is new.

  Not the hangover. The sense of purpose.

  Motivated entirely by self-preservation, he quits drinking and fucking and having fun, and gets married. Has a few kids. Never says a bad word about anyone and praises God morning, noon and night.

  Pretty soon, God takes notice. He starts taking walks with Noah like he used to do with Enoch. And apart from making Enoch jealous to the point that he sets all of God’s robes on fire, it allows Noah to do some serious ass kissing.

  On their last walk together, he forgets to mention when God brings it up that those kids who beat the old man to death and then pissed on his corpse didn’t do that just because they felt like it. That was known among locals as the ‘Noah Special’, and the old man had it coming after he bumped into Noah on the street. I mean, he was blind, but there was definitely malicious intent behind that bump. He must have known that Noah fucked every one of his daughters and his wife, and that bump was him getting some payback for it. And since Noah couldn’t take revenge himself at the risk of undoing all his work with the big guy, he dared a couple of local kids to do it for him.

  Now, everything he’s worked so hard for has paid off. All the wine he didn’t drink, the women he didn’t fuck, the people he didn’t kill – finally, all of that has been worth it. He’s safe and dry as the last bobbing head sinks beneath the surface of the water, smiling like Andy Dufresne.

  And in the morning, Phase Two of the plan can begin...

  Now, God might have thought the whole thing with Noah and his family peeing on the victims of the flood was a little strange, but it was something he could overlook. Maybe the only way to cope with such terrible survivor’s guilt was to dehumanise them a little bit.

  What’s harder to overlook is when the drowned bodies start floating to the surface, buoyed up by the gases produced in decomposition. It’s not the bodies themselves that attract God’s attention, but what Noah’s doing to them.

  He goes up to the roof with his family and forces them to watch as he takes a bow and arrow, lights the arrow-head on fire, and shoots it at one of the bodies.

  The second the flaming arrow-head pierces the skin and comes into contact with the toxic gas, the body explodes, sending blood and chunks of flesh flying everywhere.

  He forces everyone to applaud, while at the same time, they’re trembling with fear. They have no fucking idea where this monster came from – mainly because the real Noah hasn’t shown his face since before he met his wife.


  And he sure hasn’t gotten any nicer in the interim.

  So God’s watching this, right? Watching Noah shoot flaming arrows at the mass of bloated, floating bodies all around him. Now, Noah’s not an expert marksman, by any means. But there’s so many corpses clustered around the ark that it’s kind of hard not to hit one. And, of course, he’s cackling like a madman while he does it.

  God’s just listening to all these bodies exploding and Noah laughing like an absolute fucking lunatic, until finally, he’s like, “I gotta do something about this.” He goes down to the ark to confront Noah, like, “What the hell, bro?”

  Noah says, “Oh, nice of you to join us. I was just providing a little entertainment for the family.”

  God looks over at the family and ‘entertained’ isn’t the word he’d use to describe them.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Noah?”

  “What?”

  “You can’t be blowing up dead bodies, man. It’s not cool.”

  “Why? You never said we couldn’t do that.”

  Now, God’s really about to lose it. “Oh good, that old fucking chestnut again.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is: this is some evil, fucking serial-killer shit you’re doing here, man.”

  “No, this is some evil, fucking serial-killer shit you did here. Look around. I didn’t kill any of these people.”

  God doesn’t have a ready retort, so he falls back on, “I thought you were better than that. Better than all these sinful motherfuckers.” He gestures to the floating bodies who haven’t been obliterated yet.

  Noah’s like, “Yeah, well, there’s only us left now, so looks like you’re stuck with what you got.”

  And God’s like, “Damn...well played.”

  He doesn’t say this, but he thinks it. Now, he has two options.

  1. Do nothing.

  2. Kill the rest of them and build another Adam from scratch.

  Really, what Noah’s betting on (with his and his family’s lives) is God’s sheer laziness.

  He’s betting that God can’t be fucked going back to the drawing board, going through that whole thing with Adam and Eve again – the disappointment, the frustration – and it turns out that he’s right.

  God’s like, “Fuck it, fine. Do whatever you want. But once this ark hits dry land, I’m laying down some ground rules.”

  And he goes back up to heaven.

  The rest of Noah’s family is like, “What the shit? You mean we’re stuck here with this fucking psychopath indefinitely?”

  Apparently so.

  But there’s one person missing from the family gathering, and he’s more than happy to be stuck on the ark.

  See, Noah’s antics on the roof have the unintended effect of distracting God from what’s going on belowdecks.

  Ham, as we found out earlier, is the middle child. He doesn’t have a wife – not because he’s young, but because he’s...well, a little different. They might have a name for what he is in the DSM-5, but back in these days, it’s the kind of thing that gets you struck dead or turned into salt.

  Basically, he’s a sex addict.

  But the object of his desire isn’t necessarily women or even humans. It doesn’t even have to be alive.

  So, in an ark filled with tranquilized animals, he’s like a kid in a candy store, and the rest of the family are too distracted with Noah to notice. They all know full well about his condition, but usually, he tries to be discreet. It’s not that he feels guilt or shame or anything like that, it’s mainly for their sake.

  He’s selfless with his compulsive fucking.

  But now, with the sheer amount of sex he’s able to have and the sheer variety of partners available to him, he’s getting sloppy. He starts taking risks like screwing in broad daylight when his family’s walking around. No one notices, or if they do, they don’t care.

  He’s going at it in the rhino pen when his mother comes in, hiding from a drunken Noah, and he plays it off like he’s just cuddling the thing. Then, once she leaves, he picks right back up where he left off.

  Once they’ve been at sea for a couple of months, Noah starts sending doves out to see if there’s any dry land, since God refuses to speak to him and let him know when the water’s going down.

  In the meantime, he’s taken his sons’ wives into his own bed and forced Shem and Japheth to have sex with his wife – that is to say, their mother.

  Why?

  I don’t know why.

  I can certainly see why he’d take his sons’ wives, even though that’s still pretty messed up.

  But making his own sons fuck their mother while he sits there watching, getting blown simultaneously by their wives?

  That’s taking the cruelty factor to a whole new level.

  Couple this with the fact that he’s making everyone call him Emperor now, and you see the kind of tyrannical dictator Noah’s shaping up to be.

  So, one night, while their little brother is off screwing everything in sight and their dad is in bed with their wives, Shem and Japheth go up to the roof and call out to God for help.

  God comes down and he’s like, “Sorry, guys, there’s nothing I can do. Your dad really pulled one over on me.”

  Then Shem and Japheth lay it out, saying they’re the ones who are getting punished, not Noah. Noah’s having the time of his life.

  God asks them what they want him to do about it. They say something, anything.

  He says the only thing he can think of is to just keep Noah at sea until he dies and then everyone else can go ashore and start again without him. They say they’re not waiting another 500 years or whatever the fuck it is, they need a solution now.

  God’s like, “Fine, chill. Jesus...”

  So the three of them put their heads together and come up with an elegant solution.

  The next day, everyone wakes to find the water gone and the ark run aground on a mountainside. They file off onto dry land – first the humans, then the animals, all limping and seeming to suffer from the same pain in their hindquarters.

  Noah immediately sets his family to work planting a vineyard and has them renovate the ark into a palace while they all sleep in a little hut lower down on the mountain. He forces them to work day and night, turning grapes into wine for him to drink, then he takes his sons’ wives to bed and kicks them out when he’s done with them.

  One such night, Shem and Japheth call out to God a second time. And God comes down, like, “Sorry, sorry, I been busy.”

  “With what?”

  In truth, he’d been playing Grand Theft Auto non-stop with Raphael, fuelled by nothing but coke and Johnny Walker Blue. Halfway through mowing down a bunch of pedestrians on a sidewalk, he was like, “Oh, fuck, the ark!”

  Now, Shem and Japheth are looking at him like, “Where the fuck have you been?” and he doesn’t have a real good answer to give them. He’s still buzzing from the coke and whiskey and he goes, “Don’t worry, I’m here now. Let’s fucking do this.”

  Meanwhile, Ham’s going into withdrawals. All the animals have scattered, and with them, the sex-on-tap he’d taken for granted these last few months. Now, he’s back to sheep and goats and occasionally holes in the ground.

  But it’s not the same.

  It’s like going back to McDonalds after eating at a five-star restaurant. Like, yeah, McDonalds is going to get you where you need to go, but it’s generic. It’s boring. Ham’s had lions and tigers and bears and now he’s supposed to go back to sheep and goats and holes in the ground.

  Fuck that, man.

  So when Shem and Japheth come up to him that night and tell him they’ve got something new for him to try, his response isn’t “What?” or “When?”, but simply, “Where?”

  They lead him up to the renovated ark and into the Emperor’s bedroom. There, passed out drunk and naked on the floor, covered in wine and bodily fluids, is their dear old dad.

  They say, “Ham...he’s all yours.”
r />   And Ham doesn’t know what to do with himself. For a moment he just stands there, staring. Given his absolute lack of discrimination in choosing his sexual partners, it surprises him that he’s never considered going after a member of his own family.

  But now that one’s been offered up to him on a silver platter, in much the same condition his exotic partners of late had been, he finds himself warming to the idea.

  Shem and Japheth don’t want to be around for whatever happens next, so they grab their wives and their mother, and they hightail it out of there.

  Once they’re far enough away, God comes down and says, “Alright, now...like I said to Noah, we’re gonna lay down some ground rules. Rule number 1: I’ve made my peace with the fact that you guys are all evil motherfuckers. You wanna eat animals, fine. But you can’t drink their blood. You bleed that motherfucker, you cook him, then you eat him. I don’t think that’s unfair.”

  Noah’s family all look around at each other and nod in agreement like, “Yeah, I think we can do that.”

  “But also, try to eat a balanced diet, will you? That’s what the plants and shit are there for. You eat nothing but meat, you’re gonna have problems. Constipation, scurvy – that kinda shit. Alright? Alright. Rule number 2, and I’m serious about this: you kill somebody, you get killed. Simple. I’m sick of this stabbing, stoning, burning, beating bullshit going on. From here on out, there’s gonna be consequences. Rule number 3: Fuck like crazy. It’s up to you guys to repopulate the earth. Adam and Eve did it last time, you got three times as many people – that is, provided the little deviant comes back, and you know he likes to fuck. It might be a little awkward, but you guys have both fucked your mom before. I know you didn’t want to, but you did, it didn’t kill you, you can do it again. Ladies, you gotta just be, like, constantly churning out kids, so at any given time, you’re either pregnant or breastfeeding. I know it’s not an ideal situation, but this is what we’ve got to work with. And finally, I realise killing everyone on earth was kind of a dick move on my part, especially seeing as you guys are gonna have kids and they’re gonna have kids who are gonna grow up to be evil motherfuckers, too. That was my bad, I accept it, and I don’t wanna hear another fucking word about it. It won’t happen again. Pinky swear.”