Nita Showman
Somewhere in Sausalito , a woman who used to sell pedigree Golden Retrievers but went bankrupt and was forced to move in with her sister, dreamed about a Tug of War on Noah’s Ark.
The Tug of War was between the Mammals and Everything else.
Everything else included flightless birds like the emu and kiwi but excluding flighted birds like the turtle dove and the peregrine falcon because they had not been invited onto Noah’s Ark
The flighted birds were forced to fly around constantly until the waters receded.
Penguins, though flightless, were also excluded, because Noah believed they could survive in the water, as were all fish, cetaceans, cephalopods, amphibians, pinnipeds, hippopotami, crocodilians, and several other species which we are not familiar with because Noah over-estimated their aquatic abilities.
Even with all of these exclusions, Noah had not built a big enough ark. A week into the forty days and nights of rain the mammals began to suspect some of the Ark’s other inhabitants could survive in the water. The situation escalated beyond hushed conversations and sideways looks when a young proboscis monkey threw a Galapagos tortoise overboard. The proboscis monkey later claimed to have mistaken the Galapagos tortoise for a turtle, but the animals had already separated into two camps: those who defended the proboscis monkey and advocated tossing more amphibious creatures overboard ('The Mammals') and those who believed the only other creature to be tossed overboard should be the young proboscis monkey ('Everything Else').
Perhaps the woman dreaming this dream in her bed in Sausalito
The marsupials, lead by a male koala, tried to distance themselves from the mammals, whom they were frequently mistaken for, by banding together and beating up the proboscis monkey, but stopped short of tossing him overboard. The only marsupials not to take part were a female kangaroo and the two platypuses hidden in her pouch who feared they would be the next to go.
The mammals, lead by a Cape buffalo, were unaware of the platypuses in the female kangaroo’s pouch and instead focussed their attention on the snakes. A black panther announced that he had seen one of the anacondas before the lottery was held to secure places on board the Ark and the rains began, swimming—swimming!—in the Amazon.
The mammals, worked into a frenzy by the black panther’s great oratory, made for the anaconda’s quarters. They grabbed the anaconda’s tail using paws, claws, trunks, jaws, horns, prehensile tails and tongues. Hearing the anaconda’s cries, the reptiles, marsupials, flightless and land-bound birds and insects grabbed the other end of the anaconda with their legs, arms, pincers, wings, and teeth.
Though the mammals were generally larger, the sheer number of flightless and land-bound insect species Noah had managed to collect prior to the rains meant it was an even contest. The millipedes and centipedes had superior traction, the rhinocerous beetles exhibited the strength which scientists centuries later would prove to be proportionally greater than any other creature on earth, and the tiniest bugs and gnats crawled into the fur and wool and hair of the mammals and tickled them.
It was such an even contest that both teams moved back at an equal pace, stretching the poor anaconda’s mid-section until—in the woman in Sausalito’s dream—the anaconda burst and sprayed candy everywhere.
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