Naamah

by Sarah Blake

  The sun-child and planet-child come back. “Ow!” says the planet-child. “You burned me.”

  “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to!”

  “I want you to leave!”

  The sun-child starts to circle the stage again, and all the raindrop-children come back. When the sun-child is at the very back of the stage, Naamah can see only the top of her zigzagging beams of crystal light. She comes center stage by passing through the raindrop-children, and they all dramatically peel away, left and right. Some groan in defeat.

  “The world looks different now.” The sun-child looks around. “What is different?” She looks at Naamah. “What is different?”

  Naamah’s cheeks feel hot. “All the children are gone.”

  “Yes! That’s it! And all this water in their place. What a different world now. I will stay here until the water is gone. At least until then.”

  The children offstage are shaking off their raindrop costumes; the shattering pieces of crystal float down in the water. Then they run back onstage.

  “Oh yes, please stay.”

  “Please stay, sun.”

  “We are so happy when you’re here.”

  “And alive!” shouts a young child.

  All the children fall silent.

  Naamah can’t tell if that was the ending of the play, as they had planned it, but she tries to clap. But trying to clap in the water is foolish, so she throws up her arms, hollers and cheers. “What a great play! Wonderfully done, children! Wonderful!”

  The children take their bows.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, the angel asks Naamah what she’s doing here.

  “I could ask you the same,” Naamah says.

  The angel’s quiet.

  “Where else could you be?” Naamah asks. “The heavens. The underworld. But could you be anywhere else if you wanted? In another world, like the sun in the children’s play?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you ever mention God to them?”

  “No.”

  “What would happen to them if you leave?”

  “Nothing. They can stay. They can leave.”

  “Really? You think everything would just continue.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why not leave, get out of here?”

  The angel’s quiet again.

  “It’s for me, isn’t it? That’s why you’re still here,” Naamah says.

  The angel looks at her.

  “What do you want from me?” Naamah gets in her face. “What do you want?”

  The angel kisses Naamah, and Naamah pulls back and floats away in the water. The angel waits for her, and she’s right to. Naamah returns to her. When she takes the angel’s tongue in her mouth, the film between them is gone.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN NAAMAH AND NOAH were first together, there were times she would take his penis into her mouth. And even when she rounded her lips over her teeth, she still felt her back teeth touch the edge of the head of his penis. Her body felt mismatched to his, but she knew, from having taken other men’s penises into her mouth, that this was true with any penis. And really it was a feeling about her own body—that she was misusing it, misunderstanding it. She never felt that with her tongue inside a woman’s vagina.

  Still, on a man, she liked playing with the point where the edge of the head gathered toward the tip. But sometimes Noah could not resist moving his hips. And then her body felt wrong again—his speed not meant to be mirrored by her neck. So she would stand up, and he would lift her by her thighs and place her on him. She would control the speed with which she fell down the shaft of his penis, how much slack she allowed in her hips until she reached his soft hair.

  If she had to decide which part of sex with Noah she liked best, it would be his strength.

  But once or twice he ejaculated in her mouth, and his semen made her mouth crawl, and there wasn’t enough water to rinse it out, there wasn’t enough bread to chew into a paste that would finally turn sweet.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE ANGEL GRABS AT Naamah’s body and Naamah grabs back. Naamah’s arms settle along the sides of the angel’s head, her hands in her hair. The angel hoists Naamah high, with her hands tight on her ass, and Naamah’s legs wrap around her. Naamah doesn’t know if the angel has enormous strength or if the water makes all the difference.

  If they were in the desert, Naamah thinks, the angel would throw her down on the bed next. Instead, the angel keeps lifting her, dragging her top teeth down Naamah’s stomach. Naamah feels weightless. She has to link her legs around the angel’s head to keep from drifting away. The angel flicks her tongue over her clit faster than anyone ever has. Soon Naamah has ejaculated, but she hasn’t orgasmed. She wonders if the angel can find the spot that Bethel found with precision, that Noah’s penis finds bluntly every time.

  It’s as if the angel hears Naamah’s thought, and maybe she does. She pulls Naamah’s body down by the hips, holds her down at her shoulder with her left hand as she pushes her right fingers in, and she’s on the spot before Naamah can let out a breath. When Naamah does breathe, it comes out a scream. Naamah pushes her nails into the angel’s back.

  She wants to know more about the angel’s body, but she can do nothing about that now. She’s busy shaking, feeling like she might shit, like she might explode. The angel places her hand on Naamah’s stomach, down low, fingers in her hair, and applies pressure to steady her in the water. Naamah wonders if the water shook all the way to the surface. All the way to the boat.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, the angel asks, “Does one of the children remind you of yourself? Is that why you come?”

  “No. Why would you ask that?”

  “It seems like a human thing to do.”

  “How long have you been watching humans?”

  “Since the beginning of humans, who didn’t look like humans, and before that. Since the beginning of this world.”

  “What do you mean, humans did not look like humans?”

  “They resembled humans, but if one came up to you, you would not think it a human—perhaps an animal, a cross between a human and an animal. Or someone from another world entirely.”

  “We grew to be this way? In how we look and talk, you mean?”

  The angel nods and looks intently at Naamah.

  “Is there something else?”

  “God did not kill you all for growing too violent. He said that, but it’s not true.”

  “But we had grown too violent.”

  “Yes. And you will be violent again.”

  “Then why?”

  “He was jealous. Children of God had begun to indulge themselves with the human women. And more than that, promising themselves to them.”

  “Can He not do what He wishes with women?”

  “He can. He has.”

  “God does not speak to me,” Naamah says.

  “I am the presence of God, at least in part. And I speak to you.”

  “I’m not sure whether I want Him to speak to me.”

  “He speaks to me constantly.”

  “Right now? I thought you hadn’t been found—didn’t want to be found. What does He say?”

  “It’s not like human speech with me. He wants me to return, and I feel that the way I might feel the sun on me. Or the way you might hear a loud sound in your chest rather than your ears.”

  “Is He angry with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will He kill you if you return?”

  “He could kill me here.”

  “Why hasn’t He?”

  “There are far fewer angels than humans.”

  “How many angels are there?”

>   “There are things even you shouldn’t know, Naamah.”

  “Do you have a family?”

  “Not in the way you think of one. But the others are dear to me. He is dear to me.”

  “Am I dear to you?”

  “No,” the angel lies.

  “Then maybe I will stop coming.”

  “Soon you will not come, because of the water’s decline, and there is nothing you or I can do about that. You will be restored to the world of the living.”

  TWELVE

  The next day, Naamah’s kept from visiting. Sadie asks her to come to the room of horses. She says, “He seems ill. He’s pawing at the ground.”

  When Naamah reaches the room, she sees only a disturbance in the hay on the floor. “I hear him, but tell me what’s happening.”

  “His back is on the ground now, and he’s tossing back and forth.”

  “We’ll need everyone. Gather them all on the deck and send Noah down here.”

  Naamah waits. She hears the horse’s legs fall against the floor, and she jumps at the sound of the hooves banging against the side of the stall. She closes her eyes until Noah is there.

  “Is he all right?” Noah asks.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “I was thinking we push him off the boat onto the patch of land and hope the fall breaks his neck.”

  Noah looks surprised, but he says, “Okay.”

  “Unless you want to try to suffocate a horse.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then can you tie rope around him and we’ll try to get him up to the deck?”

  He nods.

  No one in the family is happy to hear the plan, but they follow it because all of their strength is needed to get the terrified horse over the railing.

  They listen as the horse hits the ground with a bang.

  “Is he dead?” Naamah asks.

  “Looks like it,” Ham says.

  “What now?” Adata asks.

  “I’ll go find out why he was sick. And that will determine what we do next. None of you go too far.”

  * * *

  • • •

  NAAMAH RUNS her hands over the dead horse. She finds the middle point between the two front legs and holds her right hand there while she swoops her left hand over the stomach and up between the two back legs to the anus. This is the path her old bone will take, the one she carries with her, ground to such a sharpness. She fights through the skin, sometimes sliding her right hand in to hold the skin taut.

  She slips both hands inside to find the intestines, cut them free, pull them out. Once they begin to slide out, they keep coming. Naamah sits back and listens to them slide over each other and settle onto the ground.

  She takes hold, gets both hands around a coil, and then she starts moving her hands along it, careful not to miss any spread of flesh, not sure what she will find.

  When she finds it, she feels foolish in her careful patience. There’s a place in the intestines that’s so firm and full. She runs her bone along it and pushes her thumb through. She feels the dozens of worms there, filling the intestine to obstruction, wriggling and alive.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE BOYS USED to bathe in the shallows of the river. Naamah made them little toys, hammering holes in the bottoms of old cups. They held them up so that one cup showered into the next, into the next. Or they held them up over one another’s heads.

  Naamah sat in the shade until they tired themselves. Then she washed each of them. She wondered when they could be trusted to wash themselves, or when it would be safe to allow them to walk to the river themselves.

  She often thought of what little things she would be free of when they were grown. She wouldn’t worry when they coughed while eating. She wouldn’t think of whether they’d had an easy time falling asleep.

  She couldn’t imagine the new concerns that would replace these, following God’s word.

  * * *

  • • •

  SHE ASKS THEM all to come down and help her push the dead horse into the water. They sweat and grunt and soon he is underwater. They wait until he rises back to the surface, the way dead bodies do, and then they keep pushing him.

  “I can’t,” Neela says. “I can’t keep going.”

  “No, of course, go rest,” Naamah says.

  The rest of them swim the horse out.

  “How much longer?” Ham asks.

  “I don’t know. I don’t want him floating next to the boat, do you?” Naamah says.

  They get far enough that no one could argue that they hadn’t done their best. Before climbing back to land, Naamah pauses to splash her face with water.

  “Naamah!” Sadie says, in a gasp.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “Nothing. It’s just, the water doesn’t seem as clean now, with the worms, and the dead horse.”

  Naamah laughs. “I guess it doesn’t.” She is deciding whether to hold her tongue about how the water is already filled with death.

  * * *

  • • •

  BACK ON BOARD, they brush the horses one by one, making sure there are no larvae in their hair, manes, tails. They lead each clean horse to the room of milking goats, to the room of sheep, to be with any animals that will tolerate the large horses and not be killed by worms.

  Adata gets a dog to help her herd goats into the horses’ stalls to eat the remaining hay. While they eat, Adata checks the walls for larvae. She tries to be as meticulous as she can, as Naamah would be if she could see them. She brushes all the remaining hay to one stall of the room, where the goats can gather around it. Then she scours the floor. She finds only two larvae. All that work for two. But maybe the goats have eaten more.

  They lead most of the horses back to their stalls. Noah has ended up on the deck with a horse who grew restless.

  While Naamah goes to Noah, the others check Adata’s work.

  “What if they already all have worms?” Sadie asks quietly.

  “I don’t know,” Adata says.

  “But then there will be no horses in the new world.”

  “Maybe God is fine with that.”

  “He will not punish us for failing one of his creatures?”

  “I don’t think so,” Adata says, but only to comfort Sadie, not out of any firm belief of her own that they are ever far from God’s grief.

  * * *

  • • •

  NOAH IS WATCHING the horse throw its head and stomp the deck in a forceful rhythm.

  “She will not settle,” Noah tells Naamah.

  “Maybe she loved the horse we took away.”

  “Maybe so,” Noah says. “I don’t think the sight of the water is helping.”

  “Can we move her back to a room?”

  “I’m worried she’ll hurt another animal.”

  “We can’t kill her and feed her to the bigger animals until we know she doesn’t have worms. We’d have to inspect her stool, maybe cut her open—”

  “That’s not what I want,” he says. “That’s not what I meant.”

  The horse neighs.

  Noah adds, “I’m sure she’ll calm.”

  They’re silent.

  “Sing to her,” Noah says.

  “You sing to her,” she whips back. “Sorry. I didn’t— Just— Why don’t you pat her on her side? Like a gallop.”

  He does, and soon the sound of the horse’s clanging hooves disappears. Only the neighing continues, between heavy breaths. Naamah reaches out her hands and walks toward the sound. When she gets close, she stops and looks down at the deck. The horse stretches her head into her waiting hands. Through the horse’s head Naamah can feel Noah’s steady pounding.

  “I’m sorry he got si
ck,” Naamah says. “I’ve done everything I can so that no more of you get sick. So that you don’t get sick. I’ll do my best for you.”

  The horse shakes her head a little.

  “Don’t worry about all that water. That’ll be gone soon. You’ll be free soon. I will make sure you are free.”

  Naamah moves her hands slowly up the horse’s head and blocks her eyes from seeing behind and to the side of her.

  “Better, right? Just look at me. You are fine. Yes? You are fine.”

  The horse calms, and Noah leads the horse back down to the stalls.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, Naamah returns to the angel’s world.

  “Hello,” says the angel.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here yesterday. A horse got sick,” she says.

  “I wonder,” the angel says, not caring about the horse, “if you can’t see animals, does that mean you can’t tell if you pass one in the water, swimming down here? Or if there’s one here, beside you now?”

  “No, I can’t,” Naamah says.

  “Does that mean you can move through them, do you think? Does one of your senses have the power to bend another to its will?”

  “No. I can still feel the animals. I’ve never swum into something in the water.”

  “Then it might be accurate to picture giant sea monsters swimming about you in languid circles as you make your way to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I will picture it so.”

  “Why?”

  “I have thought about this. Why this picture of you rises again and again in my mind. I think it must be satisfying for me, to see you in a vulnerable position that you’re unaware of.”

  “Is that not my whole life, circled by God?”

  “No, definitely not. You are far too aware of Him.”

  Naamah laughs, but the angel continues as if she has not heard. “There is no unguarded moment in your life.”

  * * *

  • • •