And on the 2,556,750,000th day, God reconsidered what he had made and decided that the world would be better off if human beings were other animals entirely — if there were no such thing as human beings at all. There would be species, but there wouldn’t be races. You wouldn’t look at a fellow zebra’s face and think yourself superior. You wouldn’t amass untold wealth. You would murder, at times, but no one would take it personally. (In the absence of people, “personally” wouldn’t be a thing.) You wouldn’t buy a gun and shoot children. You wouldn’t invent nuclear weapons. You wouldn’t blithely burn fossil fuels and irreversibly affect the planet’s climate.
Jade was at her best friend Ruby’s house when both of their phones pinged with the news, like it was an Amber Alert or a hurricane warning. Ruby wouldn’t have been surprised if God were the subject of an Amber Alert. Look out for God, driving a windowless white van with a vanity plate. To be honest, Ruby didn’t think very much of God.
Jade was straining pasta over Ruby’s sink. The hot steam rose into her face, a carbohydrate facial. Ruby stirred the pot of sauce over the stove. A bubble popped and splashed red tomato, not on her apron but just to the side of it, onto her white shirt. This was always happening to Ruby.
“What animals have friends?” Jade asked Ruby.
Ruby typed the question into her phone.
“Cetaceans are capable of true friendship,” Ruby read. “Higher primates, elephants, camelids, certain members of the horse family.”
“Camelids are camels?” Jade asked.
“And llamas and alpacas.”
At the end of the month, God declared, all people would be transformed. Ruby, Jade, and the rest of humanity would have thirty days to select what they wanted to spend the rest of their lives as. They had the entire animal kingdom to choose from. After the deadline, humans would not exist.
They sat down to eat their dinner. Ruby poured their wine into her favorite little museum-store glasses, which were shaped like egg cups. The friends clinked their glasses together and drank.
“What animals get drunk?” Ruby asked.
“That one I know.” Jade laughed. “Elephants and parrots. Deer, moose, bats.”
“So elephants have friends and get drunk,” Ruby mused.
“Except it takes a lot to get them drunk. Obviously. Females are” — Jade peered into her phone — “six to eight thousand pounds.”
“It would be nice, weighing six to eight thousand pounds and not obsessing over it.”
Jade twirled spaghetti around her fork and conveyed it to her mouth.
“What’d you put in this sauce? It’s so good.”
“Fish sauce! You like it?”
“I’m going to miss your cooking.”
“You won’t, though,” Ruby said, laughing sadly. “I mean, that’s the kind of beautiful thing.”
The change was meant to take us down a peg. A naval expression. A ship’s colors were maneuvered via pegs. There were higher and lower colors, more and less honorable ships. Humanity was to be taken down a peg so that we would stop coming up with such stupid sayings in the first place.
For the first two weeks after the announcement, political bickering paused. Instead, zoologists were in high demand, appearing on television shows, looking a bit confused by their newfound fame. Nature programs, which had been declining in popularity, saw a surge in viewership and revenue.
“What’s your choice?” people asked one another. Everyone, everywhere, was trying to make sense of things: ferret out the superior choice (not ferrets or other rodents for most).
Ruby thought it was ludicrous. The point was to be freed of trivial human concerns, and yet humans were already trying to extrapolate based on human social conventions, like romance and marriage. Penguins were well publicized as animals that mated for life. Many, many people wanted to be penguins, but were we going to have a world full of penguins? When it was getting so warm? Mammals were most popular: cold-bloodedness left many, well, cold. It was the same with insects. God had declared extinct animals an option, but of course, it was possible, even probable, that you might go extinct again.
In the United States, the choices soon became political. Ruby thought this, too, was absurd: there was nothing inherently political about animals, but once the partisan pundits took sides, you could predict what an American would choose based on their political affiliation. Conservatives tended not to go with anything that underwent metamorphosis, like caterpillars and tadpoles. They were unwilling to become anything too radically different from themselves. As a result, they were primarily interested in primates, like orangutans and gibbons. Libertarians gravitated to lone wolves and fiddler crabs: every-“man”-for-“himself”-type animals. They liked defensive animals too: porcupines and skunks.
Liberals were sensitive to the fact of climate change and opted for animals that could withstand extreme heat and would do best in the sweltering climate of our near future. They thought of themselves as individuals who were committed to creative expression, but really, when it came down to it, they wanted to do what celebrities did — whatever was trending on social media. They wanted to be part of a literal flock; geese and sheep were popular choices.
There were unbelievers too: staunch atheists and conspiracy theorists. They argued that we hadn’t seen God, had we? It was only an alert we got on our phones. How could we know for certain that it had been a message from God and not some Russian scammers? And if God indeed materialized, needing to know what animal they’d like to be? The unbelievers planned to panic-order, like at a restaurant with a big menu. Their blurted-out answers would reflect their truest desires.
Jade and Ruby met at their favorite old movie theater. It was painted with a large, detailed mural dating back to 1922. Every time they examined it, they found some element they’d never noticed before. Today it was a nude baby in the corner, casually holding a watermelon. At the concession stand, Jade ordered a large popcorn from an acne-riddled teen named Halvor.
“What’s your choice?” Jade asked Halvor. It was small talk now.
“Electric eel,” Halvor said.
“Very cool,” Jade replied.
In the darkened theater, Ruby produced the friends’ preferred condiments from her purse: furikake, sea salt, a double-bagged baby-food jar of melted real butter.
They had been friends since they were six years old. That was thirty years of being friends. At six they’d made “perfume” together by steeping rose petals in water; at twelve they’d practiced freak dancing; at eighteen they’d held the other’s hair back as they each puked from too many Jell-O shots. They knew which movie the other wanted to see without asking.
There had been a deluge of personal essays and podcasts about the impending change, which everyone was now calling Devolution Day. D Day. It was such a human thing, to call it a regression. But there hadn’t been enough time for the medium of film to grapple with the concern of the day, so going to the movies was still a very anthropocentric activity.
This movie was about a pianist on a deserted island. He had to build his own piano using vines and pieces of his shipwrecked ship, with shells for the keys. All the native animals lived on this island without the torment that afflicted this shipwrecked man, but of course, the film was about the human who struggled against the elements and missed music so badly that he spent days processing coconuts into piano material.
The friends emerged from the darkened theater, their eyes squinting to adjust to the light. Ruby loved the movie. Her tastes were a little more expansive than Jade’s because Ruby had seen more and stranger movies. Ruby could tell from the neutral expression on Jade’s face that Jade hadn’t liked the film, so she tempered her enthusiasm. Jade didn’t fully express her dislike of it. But it wasn’t a lack of honesty that kept them from sharing. It was that they understood each other so well already, without speaking. They weren’t the sort of friends who had spirited exchanges over art. Ruby had those friends, friends who derived pleasure from aesthetic arguments. With them, there was the pleasure of combat — articulating your differences in perception, insisting on your rightness. But though these conversations could be a lot of fun, you could also leave the encounters feeling more rigid in who you were.
With Jade it was different, and Ruby thought it made their relationship more special. It did make Ruby a little sad, though, that she couldn’t gush over how wonderful the movie was. Ruby thought it had articulated something inarticulable, in the way transcendent art did. She felt emotionally pierced, even changed. But although commonalities bolstered a friendship, Ruby knew better than to be hurt by Jade’s lack of enthusiasm. It happened more frequently than you would think — that someone you loved loved different things than you.
In the parking lot, Ruby put her sunglasses on. Jade wore glasses with clip-on shades held by magnets, and she clipped those on. It was deceptive: Ruby actually had worse vision but wore contact lenses, so she was presumed to have better eyesight.
At their favorite pho restaurant, Jade ordered for the both of them, their usual: two rare steak phos, two Vietnamese iced coffees, and a #44, barbecue pork vermicelli, to share. Ruby squirted hoisin and sriracha into a little dish, in a yin-yang symbol.
“I quit my job,” Jade said. She worked with a woman who made leather handbags. “It felt wrong.”
“I thought they were vegan leather?”
“I mean, yeah. But still. The concept of leather now.” Jade shuddered.
Their pho arrived: pink lily pads of rare meat, thin rings of white onion.
“Animals that get the most sleep,” Ruby said, “are sloths, koalas, bats, armadillos, cats.”
“You know, bats sleep a lot and get drunk. So those are pluses. But they gross me out.”
“You’re only finding them gross because of your own humanness. You wouldn’t find yourself gross, as a bat. You wouldn’t, like, consider yourself in any reflective surfaces.”
They were both artists — Jade a painter and Ruby a novelist — but Ruby had always been the more practical of the two. It was what it was; Ruby disliked her own practicality. Every day she wrote for four hours. She only drank alcohol on weekends. In her thirties, she metabolized alcohol less efficiently, so any amount ruined her writing mornings. She lived by Flaubert: “Be boring and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
While everyone was busy being upset that they would be transformed into non–Homo sapiens, Ruby had come up with a spreadsheet of animals, listing the pros and cons of each.
“Don’t make fun of me,” Jade admitted, “but I’m thinking of seeing an astrologer.”
“Jade!” Ruby said, shocked.
“I knew I shouldn’t mention it.”
“No, I’m sorry. Of course you should. I’ll be curious to hear what they think.”
Even though there was less than a month left of capitalism itself, businesses were still springing up. Consultants who claimed to be able to look into your soul, via your eyes, and tell you exactly what animal you were meant to be. Astrologers who could tell you, via your birth chart, what was best for you. It wasn’t as straightforward as Leos being lions and Cancers being crabs. No, it was vastly more complicated than that; it depended on your ascendant, where your Neptune was placed, your midheaven.
Real estate developers pivoted from luxury condos to luxury holding pens and aquariums, as though any animal would elect to live in captivity, however luxurious. Ruby thought it was terrible and predatory and greedy.
Then there were the orgies. A nightly party called Last Gasp sprang up on both coasts. But the frantic sex-having struck Ruby as absurd too. Animals were having orgies constantly. Or was it unwanted sexual advances? It depended on the animal, Ruby supposed. Still, sex in the animal kingdom seemed, for many species, less fraught than human dating.
“What animals experience sexual pleasure?” Jade asked Ruby.
“Not cats. Razor penises.” Ruby shuddered.
“Dolphins, maybe.”
“Don’t dolphins seem so, I don’t know, basic? The golden retrievers of cetaceans.”
“Definitely.” Jade dipped a raw bean sprout in sriracha. “I’ve been thinking of a bonobo, except that’s what all the Republicans want to be.”
“They won’t be Republican as bonobos, though. None of us will be anything.”
“Yeah, but don’t you think some Republican essence will remain?”
“No, I don’t.”
“We should be together, though. You and me. Don’t you think? I’m not seriously considering bonobo.”
“Not as penguins,” Ruby said. “I refuse to be a penguin.”
“We won’t be penguins.”
Jade’s glasses were foggy. She wiped them with a microfiber square she carried around in her purse.
“You know all those preppers who thought they should get LASIK because of the apocalypse?” Ruby mused. “Now it doesn’t even matter. You could be an animal who sees better than humans. You could even see more color.”
“Which ones are those?”
“The mantis shrimp has sixteen color-receptive cones. As compared to our three.”
“Butterflies probably have good vision.”
“I wonder if God would let us be rocks,” Ruby joked. “Jade and Ruby. Stay who we are, forever.”
“There would be nobody around to find us precious. To wear us as adornment.”
“There’s something very lovely about that,” Ruby agreed, happily.
One week remained. Ruby wanted to bask in the most human things. What were they? To her they were domestic tasks that most others found unspectacular: cooking noodles, solving crossword puzzles, replacing the ink in her fountain pen. Pumicing her rough feet. Responding to emails with: “Sorry for my delay in getting back to you.” She even savored, for the first time, sitting in traffic on her way to Jade’s apartment.
“What’s the most human thing we could do right now?” Jade asked.
“Escape an escape room? Bake a multilayered cake?”
Jade nodded.
“Let’s bake a cake and do an escape room.”
They were frosting the cake when Jade, using the offset spatula to smooth the frosting around the cake’s sides, spoke up.
“I think I want to be a whale,” Jade said.
She seemed nervous to be saying this out loud, and Ruby turned, surprised, to her friend. In her hand she held edible flowers harvested from Jade’s container garden, and she felt her fist involuntarily closing around them, crushing their delicate petals. It was the first time either of them had expressed a real desire. Until that moment, they’d only brought up possibilities in a joking way.
“Oh, wow,” Ruby said. She tried not to seem too surprised or at all alarmed. “What kind?”
“Bowhead whales live to two hundred.”
Ruby affixed the flowers — pansies and calendula — to the sides of the cake. It was a two-tiered carrot cake. Their hands were orange from grating the carrots.
“I don’t know if I want to live that long,” Ruby said, slowly.
“Really?” Jade asked. “Don’t you think it would be fun, being in the same pod for two hundred years?”
“I would love to be in your pod,” Ruby assured. “I think they’re also called gams.”
“What if we chose a shorter-lived whale? Blue whales only live to eighty or ninety.” Jade’s voice had a tinge of desperation in it. “Or beluga whales — they live to fifty. Plus, they’re cute.”
“We won’t know that we’re cute.”
“Don’t be like that, Ruby,” Jade said. Tears were gathering in her eyes. “Be honest with me. Could you be a whale?”
“I don’t know, Jade,” Ruby said. “I have to think about it. I’m sorry.”
They sliced and ate the cake in silence. When it came time for their escape-room appointment, Jade told Ruby she wasn’t in the mood.
“Oh, okay,” Ruby said. “We could do something else. We could grill a couple steaks? That’s very human.”
“Actually, I think I’d rather be alone right now,” Jade said.
“Okay,” Ruby said. “Of course. No problem.”
She took her car keys from Jade’s kitchen counter. Then she hugged her friend, who returned her embrace stiffly.
All her life, Ruby had felt like a weirdo. What other people had — groups of friends, romantic partners, weddings where they were treated like celebrities, spacious houses, adorable and well-behaved children, covetous experiences — Ruby had never wanted. She wasn’t shirking these things as a point of identity, like a digital nomad or monk, but simply because she had always viewed them as extraneous — empty.
Only two things made her feel like she wasn’t completely inhuman. One was working: immersing herself in her writing. The other was being around Jade. Writing didn’t prove that she wasn’t a waste of humanity. It was merely something she enjoyed and felt called to do. No one asked her to do it. In fact, most people found it bewildering that she kept at it. Everyone Ruby spoke to seemed puzzled that she was a writer despite not being Ocean Vuong. I wish I were Ocean Vuong too, she wanted to say to these people. Not because he was famous but because he no longer had to justify his existence. It wasn’t questioned, his compulsion to spend precious time — the last days — considering the placement of commas.
It was being around Jade, a human being, that made her feel like she wasn’t wholly worthless. Ruby thought of how she had recently picked up what looked like a tiny black seed from her kitchen counter. Was it a seed, or bead, or piece of plastic? Viewing it under a magnifying glass, she saw that it had numerous tiny legs. One leg moved. She’d shrieked and dropped the bug somewhere on her kitchen floor.
Since then, she had thought of herself that way: a minuscule life-form, no larger than a sesame seed, that made God shudder a little in disgust. Only Jade had witnessed Ruby in every iteration of her life and not fled. They hadn’t even vowed to stay together, as married people did. And yet Jade remained, and Ruby too. That counted for something, didn’t it?
Ruby loved her friend so dearly. Why couldn’t she agree to be a whale? It could be so simple. And yet something held her back.
Thirty-two hours remained. Jade and Ruby carpooled to their friend Cassandra’s house. In their larger friend circle, everyone had been throwing extravagant parties, trying to spend all the money they could before money no longer mattered. Last week, they’d attended a party with butter sculptures and not one but four ice luges. Ruby received a chilled vodka shot from an ice penis, chiseled with veins, originating from a glistening male torso. At another party, a turducken sat on an enormous doily. The host sliced neatly into it with an electric carving knife, exposing the wonders within, a breathtaking meat geode.
Cassandra welcomed them. She wore a silk dress that draped beautifully across her round, uniquely human breasts. Servers, hired from a pool of unbelievers, circulated with champagne flutes and crystal dishes of the finest beluga caviar. In the future, no one would really eat caviar except for bears, and maybe larger fish, though they wouldn’t comprehend it for the delicacy that it was.
Jade and Ruby were pleased to see their friends enjoying themselves, but as usual, the two of them wound up talking to each other. Ruby’s parents planned to be turtle doves, and her younger brother would be a partridge. They were irritated with her for not wanting to be a bird along with them. Ruby’s mother was so bereft that she wouldn’t speak to her. But Ruby had always been the odd one out — the odd duck, so to speak.
Jade’s mother wanted to be a poodle, even though Jade had encouraged her to pick something wilder. How would a domesticated dog manage without a human owner? Did they even know how to hunt? It would be better to be a house cat, Jade had argued. But stubbornly, Jade’s mother insisted on being a poodle.
“What are you thinking?” Jade asked finally. The friends had been avoiding the question all night, wanting to enjoy the party.
“I think,” Ruby said, slowly, watching her friend’s face. “I think I want to be a turtle.”
Ruby always postponed decisions right up until the deadline. She had abandoned her spreadsheet. She always tried to plan things — it was this way with her writing too — but in the end, this, like writing, was an intuitive endeavor. She couldn’t explain it, but Ruby felt, deep in her bones, that she wanted to be a turtle.
Jade loaded a potato chip with caviar, placed the entirety of it on her tongue, and chewed for a long moment.
“But turtles live even longer than whales,” Jade said, as neutrally as she could manage.
Ruby saw that Jade’s teeth were gray from the bite.
“I guess it wasn’t about the lifespan at all,” Ruby admitted. “I don’t know if I can explain it.”
“A freshwater turtle?”
“I don’t think I want to be a sea turtle, unfortunately.”
“So we won’t even be in the same body of water.”
“I know, Jade. I’m sorry. You can’t let me hold you back from being a whale.”
Jade said nothing.
“Please. Please don’t be mad at me,” Ruby said. “I couldn’t stand it if you were mad at me in our last” — she looked at her watch — “twenty-nine hours.”
Jade said nothing, still.
“I’m just sad,” Jade said, finally. “I’ll miss you.”
“You won’t actually — ”
“Stop it, Ruby,” Jade said, angrily. “Don’t tell me I won’t be able to miss.” Tears fell down her cheeks in pronounced, dramatic rivulets. “I will miss you.”
“And I’ll miss you, Jade,” Ruby said. She’d told herself she wouldn’t, but she started crying too.
Jade slept over at Ruby’s. In the morning, they indulged in a hungover feast of painkillers and waffles and bacon, which Ruby made extra crispy, the way Jade liked. Afterward, they climbed onto Ruby’s roof and threw dirty dishes off the side of it, because they didn’t need to wash them anymore. The dishes shattered satisfyingly on the asphalt.
In their final daylight hours, they planned to hang glide, scuba dive, and say goodbye to their families. The hang gliding and scuba diving were ways of confirming their choices. They would never know flight. And Jade needed to make sure the ocean was where she truly belonged.
The hang gliding was done in tandem. Ruby and Jade were each strapped to an experienced glider to soar over the earth, like a kite or bird. The sky was blue — puffs of idyllic white clouds — and below was like a diorama, which in a way, to God, it was. Humans were the heads of pins, trees like green tufts of a wool sweater, and in the great blue ocean below, a bowl of water, surfboards floated like sprinkles. It was literally breathtaking: Ruby’s head grew light, and she reminded herself to inhale.
After that, they changed into rubbery black suits, strapped oxygen tanks to their backs, and slid their feet into flippers. The water, which had appeared blank from above, was rich with life: schools of shining fish, cityscapes of vibrant coral, marine animals that struck them as wearing expressions that were stoic, clownish, expectant, smug. Yes, it was anthropomorphizing, but why not engage in anthropomorphism on this one final occasion? Jade and Ruby swam side by side, through curtains of gently waving seaweeds, each gesturing to capture the other’s attention, to point out interesting fauna and flora. It was all transcendently beautiful, Ruby thought. It wasn’t that she was regretting her decision to be a freshwater turtle. But she was overcome with a feeling of wonder — of awe. As Ruby swam soundlessly beside her best friend amid the other creatures, she reluctantly conceded that God had done a pretty good job with the world. Quite honestly, it was possibly too good: too magnificent for any human to take in, too intricate, too improbable, too sublime. Maybe that was why human beings had the myopia they did — starting wars, committing atrocities against the planet and one another. Maybe that was why Ruby had spent so much of her own humanity obsessing over what someone thought of her, or being annoyed with family members who voted for the wrong president, or reading arguments on Twitter. Humans were more at ease with human-size problems. Being struck with awe, remembering how small one was, how little one knew, the fact of one’s mortality and insignificance and triviality — it was all deeply uncomfortable.
That evening, Ruby and Jade visited their families. At the front door, Ruby hugged her father and brother. Her mother was still too upset to speak with her, so Ruby left a handwritten note that she hoped sufficiently expressed how much she loved her.
Back at Ruby’s house, they popped popcorn and watched Chungking Express. Over the years, they’d found the film charming and then annoying and now charming again. They brushed and flossed their teeth, not because they had to but because sleeping with clean teeth felt nice. Lights out, lying side by side, they began to talk the way they had when they were girls having sleepovers. Earlier that day they had texted their final decisions to God — whale for Jade and turtle for Ruby — and received brown thumbs-up emojis.
At four in the morning, their time, all of humanity would evaporate. Each person would be transformed and placed in a suitable habitat. It would happen painlessly, God assured, although what did God even know, Ruby wondered, about pain? He experienced neither pain nor pleasure. He didn’t know what it was like to have a best friend like Jade. Poor God, Ruby thought. Having a friend like Jade had been the best experience of her whole human life.
“Remember the time we raced snails?” Jade asked. Ruby could hear her smiling in the dark. “And my mom got so mad because it was dinnertime. And the snails were too slow.”
“I remember! And we brought them inside, in our pockets, to race in the bathtub.”
“Delilah and Joseph.”
“I can’t believe you remember that. And one of them — I think it was mine — it died from fright before we reached the bathtub.”
“I forgot about that. How terrible!”
“It’s probably one of the reasons God is doing all this.”
“That we’re so careless with other animals?”
“Yeah. And with each other.”
They lay in the silence for a long moment.
“Do you want to be conscious when this happens?” Ruby asked. “Or should we try to get some sleep?”
“I don’t know. What about you?”
“I don’t know either.”
There was another long silence.
“Jade, I’m sorry that — ” Ruby paused.
There were so many things she needed to apologize for that she didn’t even know where to begin. The times she’d neglected her friend because she believed her work was paramount. The times she’d been stubborn and hadn’t compromised, when she easily could have to make Jade happy. The times she knew Jade was going through difficulties but hadn’t known what to say. Despite being a writer, she wasn’t good with spoken words. During those periods, she’d cooked bulk meals for Jade — tagines she’d lovingly prepared with lemons she’d preserved herself, or kimchee stews with kimchee she’d fermented — and mopped Jade’s floor or taken out Jade’s trash. She knew Jade would have liked verbal reassurance too, but Ruby didn’t know how to offer it. She never would now.
“It’s okay, Ruby.” Jade’s voice was clear and steady. “I know. I know you. I love you so much.”
“I love you, Jade.” Ruby reached out to take her friend’s hand.
In the dark, they held hands, squeezing occasionally until their hands grew unbearably sweaty, and each released the other at the same time.
“I don’t think I can sleep,” Jade said.
“Me neither.”
“Should we do something else?”
Ruby stood up and turned the lights on. She peeked out the window and saw that other lights were on too.
“What about…” Ruby thought. “What about YouTube karaoke?”
It was a perfect idea. Online, they could find almost any song in the world: lyrics presented against a backdrop of bizarre, often unrelated videos. The friends danced and laughed and sang at the top of their lungs to Tracy Chapman and the Cranberries and Macy Gray and Nirvana.
“Oh, I know!” Ruby exclaimed.
“What?” Jade asked. She held her closed fist to her mouth — a pretend microphone.
“I have a good one. Hang on.” Ruby angled her laptop away from Jade so that the song selection would be a surprise.
The familiar notes of Pachelbel’s Canon in D came on. Jade broke into laughter, delighted. They didn’t need the lyrics. The friends knew them by heart. Ruby turned the lights back off and held her cell phone flashlight up, swaying with the chorus. Jade held hers up too. They sang loudly about being friends forever, no matter how their lives changed.
“La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la,” Ruby and Jade sang together at the top of their lungs. “La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la — ”
They put their phones down and, with their arms around each other’s waists, were singing, as loudly as they had ever sung, when in a moment, a hundredth of a second, Ruby and Jade vaporized with the rest of humanity, atoms scattering, traveling, reassembling, Jade in the Pacific Ocean and Ruby in an Australian pond.
But, as to be expected with such an enormous undertaking, there was a glitch. For a fraction of a second, Jade, in the body of a blue whale, and Ruby, in the body of a freshwater turtle, sustained human thoughts. Jade thought Ruby, and Ruby thought Jade. Then God put His divine palm to His divine face and corrected the error. From then on, Jade swam, and Ruby basked in the sun’s warm rays.
And God looked upon everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good.
