Molia Dumbleton
1. THE DISPATCHRighteous
From what we could tell from the back of the crowd, there was nothing to it but chance, and the odds were bad. Really bad. Two, was it? Out of all of us? Our mother slid in among us as we watched, touching each of us tenderly with her trunk, and we could feel the cool tension of her skin.
We’d caught a glimpse of the man himself as he pushed his way through the families. A small woman followed him, taking notes. Too big this, too small that, the man said. Too much x, too little y. The woman wrote it all down. Most of us didn’t even know what we were trying out for, but still the insults stung.
Meanwhile, rumors were flying. Someone had heard something about pairs, so the most recent murmurs were about whether that meant two or two pairs of two? Someone else had heard seven. Eventually, the man grabbed the woman’s pen, slapped down two X’s, and swept out. The woman straightened her papers and began reading from them in a tone so flat it made us wonder whether she was really on board.
God said to Noah, she said—and here she did a God voice: I am going to put an end to all people, for the Earth is filled with violence because of them.
We were silent now. Our eyeballs clicked from one to the next of us, confirming our collective reaction. It wasn’t as if we disagreed with the second part, but that first part—
I am surely going to destroy both them AND the earth, she said.
We shifted.
I will bring a flood of waters to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life—
Questions began bubbling through the crowd.
“How big is a cubit? Am I a cubit? If I put my children on my back, are they a cubit?”
“I don’t think it’s fair to say we swarm, do you? Really? Swarm?”
“Does a trunk count as nostrils? I’m pretty sure she mentioned nostrils specifically.”
The woman was still talking. Noah and his family shall go into the ark, she said, for God has found him righteous—
“So he thinks the new people will be better? Because they’re descended from that piece of—”
The woman raised her voice this time. And God said, Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty—
“Whoa whoa whoa, so we still have a week?”
"Well,” she said. “These notes are from…”—she rifled through her papers—“whoops, last Thursday. That means—” She counted on her fingers and got to seven.
* * *
When the time came, it was our father who was chosen first. He was big and strong, and the consensus among strangers had always seemed to be that he was handsome—but those of us who lived with him also knew that he was volatile at the best of times, so our hearts were not broken when he was selected.
Next they came for one of our cousins. Our mother’s sister’s second youngest, who had only recently stopped rolling in mud and tugging at her own mother’s tail.
Side by side, the two were roped and led away.
As my father passed, he lifted his chin and searched for our mother’s eyes—Do you see? Do you see who I am?—but she was busy looking for her niece, who was still too small to see over the crowd, and whose wild eyes were begging every stranger she passed, Was this real? What had she done to deserve this?
And then they were both gone,
and the rest of us were left behind,
and rain began to fall on the Earth.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYOld-school datebook/to-do list
Phone with eleventy alarms set so I don’t forget to do the things
Lukewarm coffee in an “I’m a grown-ass woman and I do what I want” mug sent by a friend who knows I need reminding
A sheet of horse stickers (because horses 🖤 ), and also because my kid gave them to me
Either a proliferation of hair ties (don’t need one) or no hair ties (need one desperately)
My “money tree” plant (still hoping)
Sometimes a guinea pig (the shy one)
3. BIOGRAPHYMolia Dumbleton's fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Sun Magazine, Ecotone, The Kenyon Review, Catapult, Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. Her work has been awarded Ireland’s Seán Ó Faoláin Story Prize and the Columbia Journal Fiction Award, among others, and her collection of stories has been a finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award, Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, and Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize. She's an Assistant Fiction Editor for Split Lip Magazine and a member of the Curatorial Board at Ragdale, and teaches creative writing at DePaul University. You can find her at www.moliadumbleton.com.