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Noah rushed down the staircase and set about collecting the rest of the animals. He chased the zebra into the scorpion pit. He squished the scorpion with a small boulder. He covered the zebra's body with scorpion poison and fed it to the lion. He brought them all to the animal receptacle, lobbed them in one by one like stones, and, making sure nobody was watching, checked them off his list.
II. Baby Moses
When Pharaoh's soldier speared Baby Moses, Moses' mother thought, keep going. She'd suffered too many soldiers' blows already, too many dive-bombing gulls and attack dogs and gigantic jumping spiders to fight back any longer. So as the soldier ran north with the impaled child, she ran south, scaling pyramids and crashing through aloe groves, until she was far beyond the city limits. She fell to the sand, clutching her side and sucking in quick painful breaths, when the Lord spoke to her: “Good work, but you forgot Baby Moses!”
“Good work”? “Forgot”? She'd watched an Egyptian gore her child without uttering so much as a hey you in defense. Forgetfulness had nothing to with it.
Before she could quite come to terms with this bit of praise, Moses' mother found herself transported mysteriously within the city limits again, a bronze Anubis smirking behind her back. Moses lay before her in his papyrus basket, looking just as he always had: dry, pale, lumpish, vaguely accusatory. Already, she could see a pack of Pharaoh's hounds ambling toward the basket, drool bubbling in the corners of their muzzles.
As the dogs formed a tight circle around her and her child, Moses' mother lifted the papyrus basket over her head and heaved it into the Nile, where it made a serene miniature splash. She looked down at the circle of cock-necked dogs and, little by little, became overwhelmed with laughter. The spiders, the papyrus basket, the stupid soldiers in their dinky little loincloths—it was as if she'd walked onstage during a play she had never seen but hated nevertheless profoundly. She laughed so hard the dogs sneaked away, embarrassed.
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