The creator of all's Arc

Chapter 11 of 13

For a hundred and fifty days the water covered the world. Then the creator remembered the boat and the small lives inside it. He closed the windows of the heavens and stopped the rain. He drove a wind across the flood, and the water began to sink. On the seventeenth day of the seventh month, the ark scraped against stone. It settled on the peak of a mountain and held there. The creator watched the great wooden hull tilt and go still, one dove circling above its roofline. Inside, Noah did not know his boat had landed. He was very old, and his hands shook when he set down his cup. He waited forty days after the ark stopped moving. Then he opened the window and sent out a raven. The bird flew and did not come back. Noah scratched a mark into the wall by the window. The wood there was already covered with marks, one for every day he had counted in the dark. The creator saw the man's fear in each scratch. Noah did not trust the raven's silence. He caught the pale dove, held it a moment, and let it go. The bird flew low over the water and returned, for the land was still drowned. Noah drew it back inside and waited seven days. On a shelf near his cup stood jars of pickled carrots, their number smaller now. Noah counted the food the way he counted the days. He sent the dove out again. This time it came back at evening with a fresh olive twig in its beak, green leaves still soft. Noah held the branch and wept. Somewhere under the water, a tree had lived and put out new growth. The creator felt the man's hope and did not answer it. He wanted Noah to keep choosing to wait, to keep trusting when nothing was certain. Noah waited seven more days. He sent the dove a last time, and it did not return. He knew then the bird had found dry ground to rest on. Noah pulled back the covering of the ark and looked out. The mountaintops stood bare in the sun. Below them the flood was draining away, leaving pools that glittered gold as sand crept in at their edges. One such pool dried even as he watched, blue water shrinking to a rim of shining grit and grey stone. The creator saw the ground grow firm. The test had not ended. It had only begun again, with one honest man and his family on a mountain, and a whole empty world below waiting to be filled. The creator wondered what these few would build with their freedom this time. He had drowned the old world to ask that question. Now the answer belonged to Noah.