NOAH’S MILLENNIUM SOLILOQUY by Maggie Nye

NOAH’S MILLENNIUM SOLILOQUY by Maggie Nye

I am building a space ark. I have the raw materials to begin. Many can be salvaged from the junkyard, which is the humble throne room of heaven’s inheritors.

Not that I believe in metaphors. We are all best served speaking simply, plainly, and with a cube of bullion under our tongues.

I have collected 130,000 pounds of aluminum rather easily. It took the better part of a century, but I am blessed with dreamless sleep all nights except Sunday, when I drown myself again and again in my indoor jacuzzi until my wife prepares the coffee.

To make a space ark fly, you must affix to its siding the wings of a sizable angel tribe. I was not compelled to do the butchering personally. Thanks be to God, he had them mailed to me first class on dry ice.

God does not need assurance of his own pardoning, but I have it on good authority that angels do not have functional nerve endings.

There is much that displeases God in the world he spawned. Lobsters, for example.

At the stroke of midnight on New Millennium’s Eve, the angel wings will stir with holy motion and the ark will initiate celestial ascent. You and I will not be aboard.

This is well. My children died so many thousands of years ago, and I have begun to move pieces of my home and body into the junkyard. Tomorrow I will move my neck and jacuzzi. I have been promised that my parts will be well used by the needful. You and your friend there are welcome to approach. Come see how easy I am to disassemble.


Maggie Nye is the former Writer-in-Residence at St. Albans School. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming at Passages North, Pleiades, and SmokeLong Quarterly.

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