When God spoke, Noah listened. His family though, needed a little more convincing.

 "So when Himself starts with the visions and the holy labors and the boat full of critters, what am I supposed to do? Talk sense? Ask questions he can't answer, like, How do you propose to keep the lions from eating the goats? Or us for that matter? No thanks. I just fuss with the stew and keep my thoughts stitched up in my head where they belong. Long ago I quit asking questions." --- The Wife

'"God will provide,'" my husband's father says. "Now go." And that's that. He leaves me to travel some twelve hundred miles with a few weeks' dried provisions and a donkey as company. I'm expected to return with no less than breeding families of every beast in creation. The problem with people who think that God will provide, is that they think God will provide." --- Bera, Daughter-in-Law

"Lately what Papa says is that God is angry and is going to destroy the whole world except us. I should feel sad about that but I don't. It shows that I was right all along, that we're all equal, ants and mice and human beings and worms. Just a few of each will survive, and the ones that will live are the things we save. The little things I've collected will be safe. I like thinking about how it will all happen because of me." --- Mirn, daughter-in-law

"Men are so amusing. Show them a pack of wolves, dominated by the males, and they will say, See? It is natural for men to rule. Fine. But produce a beehive, controlled by the queen, with males used for menial labor, and they protest: Human beings are not insects! Yes, well." --- Ilya, daughter-in-law 

Excerpted from THE PRESERVATIONIST © Copyright 2005 by David Maine. Reprinted with permission by St. Martin's Griffin. All rights reserved.