The animals were all dead, so forget about two by twos. Forget about personal objects; we had the clothes we were wearing and sharpened sticks.
Well, we had the Ark, too, but we did not think of it as ours. We thought of it as a thing we would inhabit temporarily or a thing that would end up swallowing us whole. The Ark was a whale and we were going to live or die inside of it.
We had the rain, yes, but the rain was constant. We had lived with it for years. The rain was air to us. The rain was our bodies, things that existed for reasons we could not understand.
We lay over each other in the ark, until there was not a part of our bodies that did not touch the body of another. We lay like that, in total darkness, and waited for the Ark, for the water, to sweep us away and into the thing that came next, which was a mystery. All things, we decided, were a mystery and it didn’t matter if you solved it or not. All that mattered was that you cling to whatever was around and wait for the water to move around you and reshape you into something beautiful.
Kevin Wilson is the author of a story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, and a novel, The Family Fang. He lives in Sewanee, TN, where he teaches at The University of the South.
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