by Sarah Blake
* * *
• • •
SHEM AND SADIE hear the scratching of claws, but they continue down the hall. They reach the sheep and usher it back toward the stairs, Sadie in front and Shem behind. As they approach the scratching again, they hear a growl. It scares Sadie.
“We can go faster, if you want,” Shem says.
That’s when they hear the first pound—the sound of an animal launching itself into its door. The wood begins to splinter.
“Run, Sadie!” Shem is right beside the door when the second pound comes, and with it, the door breaks. Shem is one step ahead of the door as the animal crashes into the other side of the hallway, driven by its own force: a polar bear.
As it scrambles for its footing, the bear swings a paw at Shem, catching his leg.
* * *
• • •
NAAMAH CLIMBS THE LADDER, grabs her clothes but doesn’t bother dressing.
“Noah!” she screams. “Noah!”
They run into each other on the stairs.
“Is everyone okay?” she asks.
“Shem and Sadie still aren’t back.”
“We need to find them.”
They run together down the stairs.
* * *
• • •
SHEM YELLS OUT in pain as he runs. The sheep is frozen in the hallway and he climbs over it. The bear lashes out at the sheep next, and the moment’s distraction gives Shem and Sadie time to make it up the stairs. At the top there is a stronger door, a barricade, for emergencies like this.
This is where Naamah and Noah find them. Through the door, they can hear the bear filling itself with the warmth of the sheep. Shem passes out from the pain, and Sadie screams. Noah scoops him up.
“He will be okay, Sadie,” Naamah says. She follows Noah to the deck. They bring out water, soap, a needle and thread, and cloth to wrap the wound. They wash his leg, and Shem wakes again. Noah gives him a bit of cloth to bite down on. Sadie is waiting nearby, knowing not to get close.
Three of the five cuts are deep enough that they need stitches. It’s hard for Shem not to pull his leg away, so Noah sits on his chest, facing away from him, holding his leg down with both hands above the knee. As Naamah stitches the biggest cuts shut, the skin is pulled. She’s worried about the remaining two cuts opening further, so they each get a stitch, too.
Noah nods that she’s done well, and he gets off of Shem’s chest. He dries and wraps Shem’s leg, and Sadie rushes over and kisses Shem hard on the mouth.
* * *
• • •
JAPHETH AND ADATA ARE DOWNSTAIRS, waiting at the barricade to see what the bear will do next. When it’s quiet, they go in. The hall is covered in blood, but the bear and dead sheep are gone. The bear dragged it back to its room, its odd den. Japheth and Adata set to work fixing the door while the bear is still eating. After this little feast, if the bear conserves its energy, it might not need to eat again for a month. And they are hoping that the water will be gone by then.
They get long planks of wood from a closet to reinforce the door. Then they start to clean the blood. Neither of them feels sick or queasy, and they’re glad to know they have each other for the times ahead.
* * *
• • •
NOAH HELPS SHEM TO BED, but Naamah tells Sadie to follow her. They walk back toward the room with the sheep. They pass Neela and Ham, and tell them what’s happened. Ham goes off to be with Shem, and Naamah pulls Neela along with her and Sadie.
When they get to the room, Naamah encourages them to play with the lambs, whose knees still buckle. So the women sit down and pretend to forget everything that has happened that day, and they play. And though Naamah cannot see the lambs, she enjoys watching two of her daughters-in-law laughing and happy.
* * *
• • •
SOON AFTER THE RAINS STOPPED, Naamah had brought buckets of dirt from the storage room up to the deck and filled a very large, low frame with it all. She gathered manure from the cows and horses and mixed it in with the dirt. Then she went down to her seeds. She took a cup of grass seed, and then cups of clover and forb seeds, too, and brought them back to the deck in a cloth bag. She half-filled a bucket with water, placed the bag inside, and put on a lid. For days she tended the dirt in the frame and swapped out the water in the bucket. Soon the seeds were sprouting.
She poked holes into the dirt with her finger, row after row, then dropped a seed into each hole. She pinched the holes closed and the dirt fell to cover the seedlings. Soon a little pasture was growing on the deck. Naamah wanted to lie in it but didn’t trust that it wasn’t a fragile thing.
She was thrilled that soon she would be able to pick grass from it and offer it to a cow or sheep. She was thrilled that soon, after she’d taken her hand to its rich surplus and removed as much as she could, complete with sounds of tearing and ripping, no one would be able to tell. Her actions would be undetectable. Her presence would mean little.
* * *
• • •
THE DAY AFTER THE LAMBS are born, early in the morning, the family takes the lambs out on the land, in the sun, to help them dry out. Naamah watches from the deck, worried she’ll knock a lamb into the water in her blindness. Noah stays behind to keep her company.
From above, Naamah watches her sons and daughters-in-law, figuring where the lambs are by the way her family moves. She can hear the lambs’ young hooves even through her family’s excited cooing. The bandage on Shem’s leg shows that some blood has made it through during the night.
“We’ll change it when he gets back to the deck,” Noah says, watching her eyes, knowing what she’s thinking.
* * *
• • •
ABOUT A MONTH after the rains stopped, Naamah heard a great rustling in one of the rooms near her own. Nothing bad had happened with any of the animals yet—no one hurt, no door broken, everything according to plan—and she was feeling bold. She entered the room.
The walls and floor of the room were covered with atlas moths, a thousand of them, some clustered in corners, others flying clumsily through the air. Naamah stepped inside and shut the door behind her. She thought she should be scared, but instead it comforted her, how this room no longer looked like a room, the walls and floor shifting in shapes of red and brown. The ends of the moths’ wings looked like the heads of yellow snakes, dissatisfied and bitter.
She slid her feet across the floor, hoping they would make way for her passing body. Some did, but some were caught under her feet and began to die. Naamah crouched and swept her arm across the floor to make a space for herself. She sat with her legs crossed, watching the wall ahead of her morph and distort. If she unfocused her eyes, the shapes seemed to move toward her. The wall would bend and lean, veer in a blink of her eye.
She closed her eyes and tried to feel the movement in her body, too, which she knew should be its own collection of endless contortions. She felt nothing but steady. She turned and pushed aside more moths so she might lie down. On her back, the moths began to climb her. She ignored them. She knew she could feel the unreliability of her own form if she could only figure out how. She tried not to focus on her body. She tried to will herself into motion. She tried to feel the floor move beneath her. And then suddenly it worked. She felt it move, and her body, in staying still, felt such a jolt that she screamed.
The moths weren’t bothered at all.
* * *
• • •
NOAH TELLS Naamah that one lamb is doing better than the other. Naamah, determined to prevent another outburst from one of the large predators, decides to feed the weaker lamb to a tiger who’s been showing signs of hunger. Since what happened to Shem, she’s been spending more time than she’d like to admit outside the predators’ rooms, hovering outside in the early mornings, listening as they pace and scratch, bellies grumbling.
> Sadie is there when Naamah goes to get the lamb.
“Oh,” Naamah says, “I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”
“That’s okay, Naamah. Would you like to sit with me?”
Naamah nods and plops down right where she is, by the door.
Sadie smiles at her. “These little ones give me such joy.” The lambs spring about. Over to Naamah and back again. Naamah can hear their hooves pop, pop, popping. She feels one starting to nibble at her pocket, where she’s stuffed a bit of clover she brought from the garden on the deck. She reaches down and can tell it’s the larger lamb. It must be. But the treat is for the smaller lamb, the sacrifice, and Naamah pushes the lamb away.
“Where is the little one?” she asks Sadie.
Sadie grabs hold of him and pulls him over to Naamah. “That was sweet of you to bring,” Sadie says, gesturing at the clover.
Naamah gets down on her knees, takes him in her arms, and brings the clover under his chin. “No, Sadie. It wasn’t.” Naamah can’t look at her. “I have to take him. The tiger could become dangerous.”
Sadie’s eyes fill with tears.
Naamah says, “It’s just . . . the water isn’t going down fast enough. You know that.”
Sadie still doesn’t respond.
“It’s not the first time we’ve had to. I . . .”
The sheep begin to bleat, as if they know.
“I wanted to shield you from it.”
“How often have you done it?” Sadie asks.
“Not terribly often.”
“You’re lying to me, Naamah.”
Naamah looks at her. “Please, let me.” She looks down again. “Let me this time.”
Sadie stands, brushes hay off her dress. Tears are falling down her cheeks, but she doesn’t whimper as she leaves the room. Naamah waits until she can’t hear Sadie’s footsteps. Then she picks up the lamb.
* * *
• • •
FOR THREE DAYS IN A ROW, Naamah returned to the room with the moths. On the second day, she spent hours examining them, scouring their bodies, and she discovered they had no mouths. She tried to entice them with food, to provoke some proboscis to unfurl. When she finally accepted that there was nothing to find, she thought, Well, how long can they live like this?
On the third day, almost all of them were dead. Their bodies were piled in layers on the floor. Some clung dead to the walls. She brought in the largest bag she could find, and started to gather up the moths. Their wings did not hold their shape at her touch. Some structural piece—inside them, around them, she didn’t know—broke, but nothing broke off. She grabbed them by the handful, threw body after body into the bag. She let the bag hang open like a mouth and swept them in by the armful. When the bag was full enough to stand on its own, she arranged its open mouth and tried to scoop them in. They fell between her elbows, slipped down against her body. Then she took the bag to the room of snakes, to the lizards, the birds, the monkeys, and spent a whole day treating animals to the spoils of the room.
* * *
• • •
DESPITE SADIE’S DISTRESS, Naamah finds herself outside the door of the tiger’s room feeling oddly indifferent. She feels the lamb’s quick breath and beating heart under her arm and against her own chest, and she wonders if it would be kinder to kill him before she takes him in. Of course it would be. She kneels down, places the lamb beside her, and breaks its neck over her leg. Then she tosses the dead body into the tiger’s feeding room and closes the door loudly behind her. Why is this any different than the moths? she asks herself over and over.
* * *
• • •
WHEN SHE’D CLEARED THE ROOM of dead moths, she found the thousands of eggs they’d left behind. She decided to kill almost all of them, then and there. She scraped them off the floor, gathered them in a bucket, took them to the deck, and threw them in the water. When the remaining eggs hatched, she fed many of the caterpillars to the other animals, just as she had done with the moths. She left about fifty caterpillars to do the process all over again. She feared that if she left only a few, she might sense their genders subconsciously and select only female caterpillars to save. Then they’d never exist on earth again; she’d never again have a room that could change everything she knew about how she could exist inside a space. In the days that followed, she saw the pattern of the moths everywhere, even when she looked at the sky. The world felt smaller because of this, her body more at ease.
EIGHT
Noah finds Naamah lying next to the garden, her chin resting on the top of the frame, her fingers gently on top of the leaves of the clover.
“The ewe is rejecting the lamb,” he says.
She raises her head off the wood.
“Will you come?”
“Yes,” she says, and they go to the room of sheep. Inside, he forgets that she can’t see them until she reminds him by clearing her throat.
“Right,” he says, going over to the ewe. “Here she is. And”—stretching over and dragging the lamb toward him—“here’s the lamb.”
The ewe kicks at the lamb, and Noah jumps back, shuffling the lamb farther away. Naamah spots some of the lamb’s shit. “Rub this on the ewe’s nose and the lamb’s butt.”
He does what she says.
“Now, shove the lamb toward her teat, and with luck she’ll bend around to smell the lamb.”
“You think this will work?”
“Not really.”
“Wha—why?”
“Because she’s not really rejecting the lamb. She’s depressed about the other lamb, and I don’t blame her. And now I bet she’s in pain, too, swollen with enough milk for two lambs. Well, almost two.”
Noah looks at Naamah.
“Is she still right here?”
“Yes,” he says, and he moves her hand to the dam’s back.
She leans down and whispers into her neck. “Please. Please, take her back.” She stays there with her face in the dirty wool.
“Are you okay, Naamah?”
She shakes her head. “Did I do the right thing?”
“Yes,” he says, “you did.”
She’s still shaking her head in the wool.
“Where was that lamb going to live?” he asks, and he picks her up off the dam and tries to look her in the eyes. “Where, Naamah? There’s no land out there yet. There’s just water.”
“I know.”
“And it’s done. What’s done is done. We can’t change it now.”
She buries her head in his chest. “But you wouldn’t change it, right? If we could?”
“I wouldn’t change it.”
“Okay,” Naamah says.
“Okay.” Noah strokes her hair. “Are you ready to get back to this?”
She nods.
But no matter what they try, they can’t make it right with the dam.
* * *
• • •
TEN WEEKS AFTER the moths died, her magical room was back again. But it wasn’t like before. Sitting and staring at the wall, she could think only of their impending deaths, the bag of broken wings, how brashly she would have to work to clear the room again.
And then that day was upon her. As she was carrying the full bag down the hall, she ran into Neela, coming out of a room Naamah had never noticed.
“What’s in there, Neela?”
“Nothing.” Neela blushed.
“Come on, which animal?” Naamah couldn’t imagine why she’d blushed, unless she’d been watching animals have sex, or some other thing that women blush about.
“No, there’s—”
Naamah pushed through her and opened the door herself. She could feel Neela standing behind her, not embarrassed or nervous, but watching to see her reaction. Is my reaction such an unknown? Naamah thought. Aren’t I the most predictable thin
g?
The room was full of paintings, canvases stretched over wooden frames. Naamah walked slowly through the room. They were organized into landscapes, abstracts, still lifes, portraits. At the portraits, Naamah’s eyes stung. There was a painting of Sadie’s younger sisters, one on the lap of the other, sitting patiently under an acacia tree.
“Does Sadie know about this?”
Neela shook her head.
“Good.” She wiped her eyes. “Did you paint these?”
“Some of them,” she said. “I was worried. I was worried we wouldn’t have art anymore.”
“Now we will.” Naamah turned and took Neela’s head in her hands, brought it down, and kissed her on her forehead. “Thank you,” she said, and then she went back to feed the bodies of moths to the animals who would make the world bountiful again.
* * *
• • •
NAAMAH FEELS she has to save the lamb, or the ewe. Or maybe it’s the broken bond she wants to save. When she goes to check on them, the room smells of mint. Noah’s flat hand is rubbing an empty space low in the air that she knows must be an udder. If that doesn’t fix it, the udder could become infected. Naamah slips back out of the room without Noah noticing.
She slides the ladder down, climbs down to the little island, and goes into the water.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” the angel says when Naamah reaches her. The village she’s built has gotten bigger. Hallways of crystal arches extend in all directions, like roads through a valley. They seem to go on forever, but really they go only as far as Naamah can see.
“You know Shem was hurt,” Naamah says.