20

Time's fed closes the fissure in the Ark double doors and feels many manual bolt locks. She turns all of them. Her legs back away from the doors. A drop bar board slams into place, startling her. Loud crash shivers the entrance as something thumps into it from outside.

Hecate, fuckate. Was that the drawbridge raising?

She wipes her brow sweat with her hoodie sleeve. Pulls a dead camper's tiny flashlight from her shit stain pants pocket. Clicks the press button on at the handle end. The light flickers brightly upon the unknown fathoms.

She turns from the door to witness the main floor like the throat of a belly cavern in the Ark. Arch of hand plainer smooth ribbing. Hollow, tenebrous rooms connect to labyrinthine corridors. Gender specific washrooms. A dress. No dress. More like clothing specific washrooms.

A young earth convenience store holds her interest in the haze of her light. A mandatory window display full of children's Ark maps and books about why evolution is wrong and the bible is always right. Adult books with children cartoons written about kinds and how Tyrannosaurus rex was a herbivore before the exile from Eden.

She walks into the store with her flashlight pointing at the book selection. Flashes it on the side of a cooler. Time's fed bites her lip and smirks with an inkling of relief. Hurries toward it. She wrenches the warm cooler door open. Takes a bottle of water and guzzles. Drops the plastic container on the floor. It bounces slightly off her big flip flop toe. She takes another. Drinks. And another. She turns to a mandatory isle and finds beef jerky. Eats an entire pack plus half a pack of teriyaki flavour jerky.

Herbivore my ass smile.

She walks out of the concession. The room dims to black behind her as her flashlight exits the vicinity.

Time's fed moves the beam of light around at the room and finds the giant hyena sitting, intestine-less like a crumbling gargoyle statue watching a particular corridor. It cackles as it breaths. Some of its skin is missing, exposing bits of muscle and skeleton. If the hyena were a fossil in the earth, it would've been placed there by the seventh day adventist version of Satan.

She points the flashlight at the walls and ceiling and comes across the actual exhibit made for the entrance of the Ark museum. The entire room is a telling like the figure of an mal'akh leaning at the head of a bed or a single hole in a blanket.

The time's fed girl realizes she's standing in the beginning. Formless. Empty. The darkness is a simulacra of pressure deep water. She shines her moving light from the wall. Moves it until the uppermost portion of the ceiling is exposed. Two enormous, oil painting, conscious-less withers of blueberry eyes watch her like nothing becoming nothing. They're aperture inklings of shrivelling black holes, sucking all knowledge from those who're within. Crushing the gravity of such science until all is pseudo. A burnt out sign, halfway down the ceiling of the beginning states, let there be light.

Light and dark dichotomize between the flashlight and the birth of shadows. A giant painting of a jack o' lantern-ish, wrinkle lip mouth, displays halfway down the wall to her right. Good is written behind inner, snowy white teeth. Time's fed imagines it silently whispering in shouts of unmoving lips. A snarly, olden merism, God reveals nothing else.

The depiction of a sky behind the mouth is like firmament between the deep. Below the firmament tend the depictions of clumps like dry land and gathering seas.

To her left are Grimshaw style murals of trees and plants. Crooked budding branches protrude from the depictions, baring seeds of each in their own kind. And each kind has a tiny mal'akh brand upon it. And within the tiny mal'akh are the letters for the good word.

The time's fed girl snaps a branch and breaks it off. Flings it behind herself. It makes no sound. She breaks another off and looks to her past steps. Throws the branch into the darkness. It is silent, like something has caught it. But nothing's there. She doubts her ears. The nothing is still something.

Weird plastic trees.

The simulacra, firmament ceiling twinkles with a glow of malachite reflection, dim stars and planets, likening signs and seasons and years and days made of the good word. Old Sol and Hecate are ponderously listless.

On her far left is a large rendition of a cobblestone megalodon, swimming beside a school of botos. Fruitfully. And on a pillar, beneath the giant, toothy monster, is an osteal, fossilized pterodactyl. It tillows, with taxidermy sparrows perching upon its long fin skull. All in their kind. The good word is carved into the bottom square of the pillar.

Above the corridor entrance, which the giant hyena's staring at, is a mural of a bulbous unicorn and a bicorn watching a sarcosuchus eat many large cantaloupes. As well, she witnesses Utah raptors with orange peels in their fangs and beavers gnawing gofer bark. Aurochs feed beside diplodocus, all in their kind.

Another mural is of mammoths in the distance blending into a tall girth cedar forest with an up close yeti kind of creature eating berries from bushes. A great ape kind.

She shines the light upon the floor before the corridor. The image of a glittering, circular mosaic outlines the black silhouette of a mal'akh holding an empyrean sword in the centre of the circle, pointing the way. The good word is an etch at the barrier of the corridor doorway.

She breathes the darkness into her lungs. Coughs like a morning smoker. Feels pneumonic and sweaty. Chilly.

The time's fed girl decides to remove her pants. She can no longer stand the feel of her own liquid feces soaking her ass smile down to the backs of her knees. Drops them to her ankles. Wears the hoodie like a short dress. Removes her flip flops and steps out of the loose zoo pants. Shuffles her feet back into the wrecked footwear. Her heel and ball and toe imprints in her flip flops have compressed the foam so much that her feet are almost touching bare ground. The beginning of a hole under the ball of her right foot.

A banging sound echoes the room from the entrance of the Ark in the past of her steps. Time's fed points the flashlight in the direction of the abrupt noise. The banging becomes multiple. Louder. Many fists and palms wrap on the Ark's raised drawbridge.

How? Unless they're climbing upon one another to reach the height.

What might've been sound like the rungs of Jacobs ladder.

Someone has spray painted the words, how near? above the entrance. She shrugs like an undertaker in the spectral world at a funeral of some ghost. Her body flinches as the banging begins sounding like bodies throwing themselves against the closed drawbridge.

There must be hundreds of them out there. What do they want? Don't they know they're the flood that the Ark was built to escape from in the first place? But how could they ever know that? Or anything ever again? Maybe this is their raison d'etre.

What might've been pound like white noise, creating an echoing, drumming thunder. The time's fed girl and the giant hyena turn away. Walk through the corridor like silent wilderness, into the second area of Noah's Ark.