The Center of Everything - By Laura Moriarty Page 0,59

microphone off the DJ stand and clipped it to the front of his baby blue jacket. He’s free to walk around now, and he does, slowly, circling the folding chairs. We can always hear his voice because of the microphone, but we have to keep turning around to see where he is. He says Lot’s wife had her chance to get away from Sodom, but she went and turned around even when she’d been told not to. All she had to do was to keep walking and not look back at her friends and neighbors as they were getting rained on by fire, but then she did, and so she got changed into a pillar of salt.

I have never seen salt in pillar form, and am not sure what it would look like. I don’t know if she was still shaped like herself, or if she just turned into a big pile of salt that you would never know used to be a person. It’s scary to think something like that could happen to you, just for not listening to directions.

He moves to the center of the rink, directly under the disco ball, shaking his head. “All this insanity that you see in the papers, the declining moral values of today—this is all part of the prophecy. If you watch the news, you can see it all unraveling before you. Deadly wars are brewing in Lebanon. The children of Israel are back in their homeland, and the stage is set for the final scene.” He looks out the window again, at the cars on the highway.

“But Lot survived the fire and brimstone,” he says, quiet again, almost whispering. “And Noah survived the flood. And just by being in this room, just by staying true to the Scripture, we’ve built ourselves an ark, haven’t we? Haven’t we?”

“We have, Pastor. We have.”

“Yes. We have. So you have nothing to fear. Scripture tells us that when the storm comes, only the faithful will be ushered through the wind and rain to live in perfect salvation. Like Noah, we will be chosen not to suffer, because we, in our lives, have chosen to live rightly.”

Noah and the ark is a difficult story to imagine, all that water coming out of nowhere, then disappearing just as fast. Last year the Kaw River flooded its banks, and when the water finally went down, the news showed dead cows lying in muddy pastures, their stomachs bloated, flies buzzing around their heads. The people who had to move the cows were wearing handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths, and even the reporter kept one held up to his face when he wasn’t talking.

It must have smelled like that when Noah’s flood went down too, but worse, because there would have been not just cows, but people too. Lots of them. Even with the rainbow in the sky, when Noah first came out of the ark and looked around, things would have been pretty gross.

“Everybody else drowned?” I ask Eileen. We are in the car, going home. At the end of the service Pastor Dave gave me a Bible, green with gold letters. I hold it carefully in my lap, feeling its weight.

She nods. “Everybody who wasn’t on the ark. But they got to bring two of each kind of animal. That’s why we still have animals today.”

We pass a field along the highway where horses are grazing, three brown horses and one gray. There is grass inside the fence, but all four of them lean their long necks over it to get at the tall grass on the other side.

“Only two horses?”

“Yes. A boy horse and a girl horse, sweetie.”

“Two of each kind?”

She runs her tongue along the bad side of her mouth. “There weren’t as many different kinds of horses back then, I think. Only when people started breeding them.”

“And polar bears?”

She nods again. “Mm-hmm.” I’m not sure if she is listening. She is thinking about the baby.

“Did they bring ice and snow for them so they wouldn’t get too hot?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Two dogs?”

“Yep.”

“All the different kinds? Saint Bernards? Poodles?”

“Yes.”

“They were in cages?”

She pauses, just for a moment. “Yes.”

“Things like tarantulas? Mice? Rats?”

“Yes, honey. Two of everything, except the fish. The flood didn’t bother them one bit.”

“Grasshoppers?”

“Yes.”

I squint, looking out the window. “Wouldn’t the tarantulas need to eat the grasshoppers? What would the tigers eat?”

She scratches her head. “They probably brought extra of stuff like that.”

I picture Noah walking around with his staff and sandals, trying to organize the