On the day God arrived with His Big Mission, He found Yara preparing to leap, fully clothed, into the Spring River.

Centuries prior to Yara’s arrival, the Spring River was declared a holy site. It was the body of water into which Saint Nicholas’s severed arm was thrown. Since this momentous occasion, the Spring River was believed to clean anything it touched. Most pilgrims understood this as a spiritual cleansing—a purification of the soul. Yara understood it on a more literal level and traveled to the Spring River whenever they needed to hard reset their cleanliness.

All along the river, life: Roseate spoonbills skimmed the shallows for minnows, pigs frolicked, turtles sunned themselves upon the rocks.

As God approached, the animals fled—a shudder of pink feathers and fading squeals—and Yara felt a burning pressure building inside their body, as if their organs were being flattened by His presence. They turned in God’s direction, careful to keep their gaze on the ground, and kneeled upon the riverbank, their shins disrupting the path of an ant colony’s leaf-carrying ceremony. The ants did not bite Yara—God was watching, and the ants liked being alive, loved to feel the weight of a veiny leaf, loved even more the sound their mandibles made piercing through that leaf.

If Yara had learned anything from their childhood spent half awake in church pews, they’d learned that man should never stare directly into the face of God. On Mount Sinai, God quaked the entire mountain with His appearance. In the temple, Isaiah could only bear to look upon God’s robe. Even God’s angels were said to drape their wings over their eyes.