I might need you to kill

Moses sat with his back against the rough stone, watching the sheep graze. The sun had begun its descent, painting the desert in deep amber. His staff lay across his knees, worn smooth by years of use.

The air shifted. Not a wind—something else. The temperature dropped several degrees, and Moses felt the familiar presence settle beside him, invisible but undeniable.

"I’ve been thinking about what I said before," God began. His voice was careful, measured. "About not killing."

Moses continued watching the sheep. One had wandered off toward a sparse patch of scrub grass. He should probably call it back.

"The thing is," God continued, "the situation in Egypt is more complex than I initially presented it." A pause. "The pharaoh’s grip on power is robust."

Moses picked at a loose thread on his robe. "You’re omniscient."

"Yes."

"So you knew this already."

"Yes." God seemed to shift uncomfortably, though Moses couldn’t see the movement. "I may have oversimplified certain aspects of the plan when we first spoke."

The wandering sheep had found another patch of grass, slightly further away. Moses clicked his tongue and it looked up, ears twitching.

"What exactly are you trying to tell me?" Moses asked, though he suspected he knew.

"I might need you to kill," God said finally. "Not directly, necessarily. But people will die. Quite a few people, actually. I’ve run the numbers."

Moses closed his eyes. The dying sun painted the inside of his eyelids red. "You could just do it yourself."

"That’s not how this works. You know that’s not how this works."

The sheep had wandered back to the flock on its own. Moses opened his eyes and watched it rejoin its companions, indistinguishable now from the others.

"Fine," Moses said. "But next time, lead with that."

For a long moment, God was silent. Then: "I’ll work on my communication."

The presence lifted. The temperature returned to normal. Moses sat in the growing dark, counting sheep until they became shadows, then counting shadows until they disappeared entirely.

—

The overseer died without ceremony. One moment he was raising his whip, the next he was folding into the sand. Moses had expected the sound of skull against stone to be louder.

No wind came. No trembling earth. No shimmer in the air. Just the hot silence of midday and the rasping breath of the Hebrew worker who’d been beneath the whip. Blood spread through the sand like water, unexpectedly dark.

Moses waited for some divine whisper to acknowledge what he’d done. But there was only the mundane sound of distant construction and the worker’s breathing slowly steadying behind him.

He realized he was still holding the stone. His grip had left impressions in his palm, little crescents that would fade. The blood on the rock wouldn’t fade, though. It had already soaked into the porous surface, becoming part of the stone’s history. He wondered if this was how God felt about changes to creation—this strange, detached awareness of permanence.

"Go home," Moses said to the worker, not turning around. He heard the man’s footsteps recede, quick but not quite running.

Moses knelt beside the overseer’s body. The man’s eyes were open, holding an expression of mild surprise, as if death had been an unexpected inconvenience. Moses reached to close them, then stopped. Perhaps this was part of it too—letting things remain as they fell.

The sun climbed higher. Moses stood, his knees stiff from the crouch. He looked at the stone in his hand one last time, then let it fall beside the body. It landed with a soft thud that seemed to echo longer than it should have.

As he walked away, he thought he caught the faintest whisper, like sand shifting in a breeze: "The first is the hardest."

But perhaps it was just the wind.