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 sick,” 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.”
THAT NIGHT, when Naamah’s back on the boat, she runs to the cold room where she stores the seeds. There are root vegetables stored there, too. She reaches her hand into the sand until she finds a carrot. She pulls it out slowly and pats the sand back down where she’s disturbed it, and then she takes the carrot to the horse, as an apology.