Noah and Naamah wake up early and take a raven to the deck. Noah hesitates. “What if it comes back with a hunk of flesh in its beak?”
“It won’t. I’ve been swimming all over and seen nothing, come across nothing.”
“Okay,” he says, and he lets the raven go.
It flies out and lands on one of the mountaintops near the boat.
“It’s already stopped,” he says.
Naamah laughs. “A little less eventful than we thought, huh?”
But then: “Look! Look!” Noah says, as the raven takes off and flies into the distance. And Noah’s excitement is so great that Naamah follows his direction. She looks out across the water for a bird she cannot see.
SADIE COMES UP TO THE DECK. “What are you two doing up here?”
“We sent out the raven,” Naamah says.
Sadie looks around, checking each horizon.
“We haven’t been able to see him for a while,” Noah says.
“When do you think he will come back?”
“Not sure,” Naamah says.
Sadie keeps gazing out, in one direction and then another.
LATE THAT NIGHT, Naamah wraps herself in a blanket and takes a small bowl of nuts to the deck. She lies down next to it and falls asleep.
She wakes up to the sound of the raven’s beak knocking around in the bowl.
“Weren’t you gone a long time,” she says, sitting up.
As she listens to the raven work on a pistachio, she takes out her sharp bone and scrapes a patch of hard, thin skin off a doum nut. She sticks the point of the bone into the flesh and traces it down, twice. She drags the flat of the blade down between the lines and takes out the slim rectangle of the spongy fruit.
She tears a bit off, places it in her palm, and extends her hand toward the raven’s tapping. She feels his beak take it. With her other hand she puts the rest of the fruit in her mouth. Sweet and sour. Bitter and spicy. She likes how much work and time it takes to have such a small bite.
THE RAVEN FLIES back and forth for days, until Naamah no longer follows his comings and goings. One night, Noah stays on the deck. He says that when the raven comes back that night, he will return him to his room.
Knowing she’ll be alone for a while, Naamah takes out a long stone, polished smooth and slightly curved. She places it between her thighs to warm it, and until it’s warm, she thinks of it only as a rock.
WHEN NAAMAH WAS A CHILD, her mother would peel half a doum nut and give it to Naamah to gnaw on, to keep her busy. Naamah remembers the feeling of her teeth scraping on the pit. It distracted her longer than most things could.
When she was becoming a woman, her mother didn’t have to tell her about sex. Naamah had seen her parents together one afternoon when she was supposed to be out, and another couple under a juniper tree she passed going to the river early one morning, and two men once in a tent near the market.
But her mother did tell her about the desire she would feel. When she should let another person fill that desire and when she should fill it herself. And her mother gave her the long stone that day.
WHEN THE STONE IS WARM and ready, Naamah thinks of Bethel. In the desert, Naamah’s neck was so warm that it matched the warmth of Bethel’s mouth. Bethel understood this. She would take Naamah’s neck in her mouth. Then she’d blow on the wet skin until it rose in bumps. Then she would lick it again, and that time Naamah would feel it.
Naamah reaches down and moves her fingers inside her vagina until they’re slick. She rubs them over the stone and then she puts the stone in. She lets it fill her. She takes her other hand and rests the tip of her middle finger on her clitoris. She wants her body to tell her what it wants next.
She goes back to the memory of Bethel and her finger moves—first down the inside of her labia on the left, then down the right. She starts to move the stone and she moves the other hand around to the bottom of her ass, the top of her thigh, and she grabs it hard like Adata had. She imagines both women with her now, and the angel, too.
She doesn’t need to move fast. She just needs to get the placement right. When her body rises to bursting, she stops the stone, raises it toward her stomach, the whole length of it, until she gasps, and then she pulls it out and her body is lost to her orgasm.
She rolls to her side and pulls in her legs as if she could trap her orgasm, observe it in the folds her body can make, thighs against stomach, arms over shins. She imagines it as a glowing thing, like a small globe of honey.
Adata and the angel drop away, but she can nearly feel where Bethel would be, lying in the bed.
ONE NIGHT, while walking in the halls, Naamah hears Neela laughing. Naamah tries to open the door quietly, but Neela notices her right away.
“Naamah, Naamah, close the door,” Neela says, waving her into the room.
Naamah closes it. “What are you doing?”
“I took out a jerboa, and boy, he can jump.”
Naamah laughs and sits next to her along the wall. “Have you done this before?”
Neela nods. “When it’s hard to sleep, I walk, and one night I found this room. It gets so noisy at night with the nocturnal animals. I came in and saw the jerboas and their burrows in the sand, and at first I wanted to feel the sand. Just feel sand again. But then one came over to my hand, and it let me pick it up. I took it out and it raised its whole body off the floor, balancing on its tail, and I clapped for it. It jumped to almost the ceiling, and I clapped again, and laughed and cheered for it. It doesn’t give me any trouble about putting it back. I think it likes me.”
Naamah listens, watching the baby moving under the curve of Neela’s belly.
“I don’t think the baby is ever still for even a second anymore,” Neela says.
“I didn’t mean to stare.”
“It’s okay. It’s amazing.”
Naamah smiles.
“It’s been hurting,” Neela says.
“Are you worried?”
“No. No, it’s been hurting the way women say it hurts, low across my belly. But in waves. It doesn’t arrive and leave, like I’ve seen in women who are going to give birth.”
“Your body is practicing.”
“My mother took me to births so I would know what it’s like.”
“It’s normal,” Naamah says.
“And soon I will have them like the other women did?”
“Yes, and then it will really be time. Then the baby will come.”
“I’m so excited, Naamah.”
“Me too.”
“You’re not mad? That I’m having a baby on the ark?”
“No. We will make it work. We’re all so excited, I think.”
Then Naamah feels something land on her head.
Neela starts laughing. The jerboa moves this way and that on Naamah’s head of black hair. Neela laughs harder and harder. “Oh,” she says, “I’m going to pee myself.” She laughs harder and places her hand low on the side of her enormous belly.
“Well, just go over to that bucket and pee if you need to.”
“Right in front of you?”
“Oh, I don’t care,” Naamah says, trying to figure out how to get the jerboa off her head. She leans forward, hoping the jerboa will just jump off, but it doesn’t.
Neela pees, and she keeps laughing, watching Naamah’s efforts, so her pee stops and starts until she’s finally finished. She goes over to Naamah and lifts the jerboa off her head, and then, slowly, untangles the hair that’s gotten caught in the jerboa’s toes.
“Thank you,” Naamah says, wondering what the jerboa looks like in Neela’s hand.
“Thank you,” Neela says, still smiling, still amused.
NOAH THINKS it’s time to send out the dove. Naamah has wanted every day to send out the dove but has held her tongue, wary of her own eagerness.
“If it doesn’t return, it has found a place to build a nest,” Noah says.
“I know.”
“I know you know,” Noah says, smiling at her. “I’m nervous.”
“What’s there to be nervous about? If it comes back, we wait a week, we send it out again. The water has to go away at some point.”
“You would think,” he says.
He looks most attractive to her when he’s making small, sly jokes like these. And when they’re having sex.
THIS TIME they all go out on the deck together. They release the dove and celebrate. They cheer and dance and drink.
Noah and Naamah leave the children to continue. They go below deck, and it’s warm enough that they undress before they get into bed. Naamah curves her back into his chest, and at first it seems like they will go to sleep. But then Noah begins to move his hand up and down her side.
Naamah takes a sharp breath in and arches her neck to signal to him that she’s ready. He kisses her neck. She can hardly feel the kiss until it’s over and the air touches her skin. She arches her back next, to raise her ass to his groin, where she feels his soft hair and his erect penis. He slides his hand down below her legs and touches her everywhere he can before he lifts her leg and slides in. Noah takes his time, gaining speed.
When Naamah’s close to orgasm she says, “Get on top.”
He comes out and they change positions and she guides him in again and grabs him with her legs, her knees high on his sides. She watches his body move into hers. She doesn’t know why that action turns her on—it’s not much to see—but it does. As he gets faster, she stops watching, brings him closer and bites his shoulder. She slaps the flat of her hand on the back of his ribs at the same speed as he moves into her, then twice the speed. She feels like she’s going to pee, but she knows she won’t. And he’s about to orgasm. And then he does. And then she does.
Even as he softens, her orgasm continues around him.
“Should I come out?”
She nods.
When he does, her orgasm comes on more strongly, but only for a moment, and then it subsides.
“I’ll pee first,” he says.
She laughs at the waves of her orgasm as they continue to come, if infrequently. Then she gets up. She kisses him on his back as he pees into a bucket. After he finishes, she pees in the bucket.
“I’ll take it out,” he says, and picks up the handle.
“Thank you,” she says, and she crawls into bed, the warmth of sex already starting to leave her.