I smiled watching the lightening bolt snap from one end of the sky to the other.
“I see the ocean,” my daughter said, pointing at the roiling sky in the distance.
“Oh,” I said. “I guess that could look like the ocean.”
“What’s it doing up there?” she asked.
“Not sure,” I said. “Maybe the mermaids wanted to have a look at the tops of the buildings for a change.”
She was quiet for a moment, like she was considering that.
“No,” she said finally. “I don’t think the mermaids care about buildings.”
“Why do you think the ocean might be in the sky?” I asked.
“I think that God is mad at us and is going to drown us all again.”
Now it was my tern to be quiet for a moment. Where the hell would she even get such an idea?
“That’s what the story that Auntie’s preacher told us said.” She continued.
“It’s just clouds,” I said. “God’s not mad at us.”
“No, he did it once. He killed everybody with water. It fell from the sky and drowned out all the men and women and chickens and dogs and everybody.”
I swallowed. “Yeah. Some people believe that,” I said.
She waited for me to talk again, but I wasn’t sure what to say, so I kept driving. My eyes watching the dark cloud shelf rolling in from the west. It really did look like an angry ocean moving over the city, priming itself to drop.
“There was a man,” I said to my daughter, peeking at her in her booster seat behind me in my car’s rear-view mirror. “Who saved some of the people, though.”
“Yes. He was a nice man,” she said.
“He was a wine-maker. Or a grape grower, or would be eventually,” I said. I peeked again and saw her small face fixed on the back of my head, listening quietly, but her giant dark eyes taking in every little detail of the ride. “Anyway. He saved a bunch of people. His family mostly.”
“Yes.” She said. “And two of each animal.”
I watched the clouds roil again, and then she spoke.
“It would be nice to have two of each animal. God made it so that the animals all got along with each other. Not like our dogs who are always fighting. God made the animals all behave.”
“That’s what the story said,” I said. “Why do you think that is?”
“Because,” she said, “I don’t think he knew that he could make the people behave too.”