noah's unnamed wife's pov while her husband builds the ark

She picks the splinters out of his palms at night.

She lights a fire, filling the air with the smell of burning tinder and bubbling fat drippings, and she kneels at her husband's side.

Noah sits, his eyes glazed over with wretched awe as he ponders what his God has asked of him, and his wife diligently removes the shards of cypress wood from his calloused hands. She washes the dust from his feet and scrubs the pitch from his rough-hewn clothes while he picks at his dinner, pushing lentils around without ever taking a bite.

It's as though the divine is a sort of wasting sickness gnawing away at his bones, taking him further and further from her with each passing day.

It is not easy, loving one whose mind is licked by sacred fire, and it's no simple thing, trying to cleave to a man who is already split down the middle in two. One half of him is here, with her, in their marriage bed, breathing in the throes of deep animal sleep, instinctively reaching for her in the dark. The other half of him is forever marooned on that mountainside where he heard God speak for the first time.

The earth will be consumed in a great flood, Noah says, crushed under a great purifying weight so that it may be washed clean.

Most days, he seems to believe it.

During the sunlit hours, when he is busy at work on his ark, she weaves and grinds grain and rubs salve into the skinned knees of her children. Oftentimes, there is no moment to pause to consider the fate of the world. But some days, when the sun dips low on the horizon and her back aches from a long day of labor, she surveys the long arch of creation.

She marks the brutalities of her species, the sins of all the neighboring cities, the black rot hidden in own heart.

But then she sees her youngest smile, or she breathes in the scent of petrichor, or she dips her blistered feet into the coolness of a narrow stream, and she wonders if perhaps, there is not much on earth still worth saving.

Perhaps, verdant life will take root even in the deepest waters of death.

And perhaps, she muses in the quietest part of her heart, God is speaking to her as well.