195 myths · Page 7 of 7
Cain hunts Abel, a generation hunts Noah, Nimrod hunts Abraham. In each chase God turns toward the one being driven, never toward the driver.
Abram carried trays of his mother's cooking to his father's statues and waited. No hand reached. The next day he took a hatchet off the shop floor.
Anoko read the dream without softening it. The stars had named Abraham at birth, and while he lived no crown would sit still.
Noah sealed the last hatch and the world went black. One pearl hung from a beam and burned like a sun over the decks.
Noah steps onto wet ground and cannot trust a clear sky. What he gets is not another hull but a year with both of its ends fastened together.
Noah had pitched every seam. Rain found the hull anyway. The last join closed from the outside, and he had no latch to test it.
New stalls, grain heaped past the awnings, children underfoot. Nobody in that square was hungry, and nobody could remember a year that had gone badly.
Rain had stopped. The hull still rolled. Noah waited for a name from heaven and heard the wild ones listed before the ox.
God handed Noah the animals to eat and then stopped him at the bowl. A beast that kills a man is the smaller danger. A brother knows where to strike.
Rain hit the pitch like thrown gravel. Noah stood in the corridor and told his sons this was a house of mourning, not a bridal chamber.
Heaven had sentenced the world to erasure, and when the scalding rain fell the giants of Noah's generation charged the ark and clawed for a seam.
A man kills in an empty field and trusts the dark, but the heavenly tablets record every deed and the sword and fire are already coming.
Noah drew the drained earth into lots and bound his sons with a curse. The first man to break that oath did it out of distaste for cold water.
In Alexandria, Philo takes the ark's measurements and finds a human body, then watches the same water rise inside a mind that stopped ruling.
The ram's blood ran into a hollow the flood had scoured. Noah went down on his knees and buried it before his sons could eat.
