A little thing...

Before the Flood
By Chris McGuigan

A late New Jersey afternoon, and I am sleeping. I dream of a boat, its dimensions seemingly (a peculiar specificity of dreams) incalculable. I begin on its deck, am led downward by someone (I am unaware or do not remember who) one wooden staircase after another. Fresh, crisp pine smell, glowing wood just spliced from ancient trees put together so recently that the beams have not yet bent concurrently, and it is the golden afternoon sun slicing through cracks and divots in the planks that light our way. I am led down more flights of stairs, down long slightly curving hallways. Ropes, lanterns, pots line the walls and strew the floors and walls, a nautical theme encroaches. I am dimly conscious that I am on the outermost perimeter of the boat- that is, on my one side is the hull, the other side I know is the birth, a massive, hulking span of empty space which I can feel the emptiness of in my bones. More flights of stairs. An Astrolabe in a corner. We are nearing our destination...I awaken, alarm going off.
I can only assume, my knowledge of very large wooden boats being so conspicuously limited, that it was Noah’s Ark that I briefly toured through. The place so foreign yet so familiar. If I may hazard a guess as to its metaphysical origins, I can only shrug my shoulders and point- perhaps we inherit a collective memory, the well spring from which every last mortal soul draws its desires, wishes, dreams. It is our hands that hammered the final nail into the bow of the Ark, our voice that summoned the animals to salvation, our grief at seeing nothing but water for 40 days, our redemption that seemed so tenuous, improbable and undeserved.