Thirst

Melissa Dennihy

Now that things are as bad as they are, it’s shameful, and almost incomprehensible, to think about what we used to do. Pouring out half a bottle because it had gone lukewarm in the car on a sunny afternoon. Filling an entire bucket to clean the floor. Leaving cups by the children’s beds every night, night after night, just to find them untouched every morning, except for the occasional fruit fly that would be floating atop the surface, drowned.

I like to tell myself I was never extravagantly wasteful. We never used a sprinkler system for the lawn, back at the house. I taught the kids years ago to urinate in the shower rather than wasting a flush. When things first started getting bad—like, can’t ignore it anymore bad—we stopped bathing the dog and let the rain do that job. Lots of people were still taking their dogs to groomers then. The chihuahuas with their little pink bows, black labs with shining coats, terriers with plaid kerchiefs tied around their necks. An embarrassing dead giveaway of what had been wasted on them.

But still, every drop counts, right? That’s the slogan, isn’t it? 55

So wasn’t pouring a warm bottle down the sink just as reckless as having that pristine, Crayola-green grass? Just as grotesque as a dog wearing a bowtie? Given where we all ended up, it feels hard to point fingers.

It’s funny what your mind fixates on. On the news, again and again, the same dire warnings: we have to save more; we have to do better. Scarcity has gotten so bad that entire species have been wiped out, entire regions have become uninhabitable. New species and new cities are added to the growing list each day. But most of the time, I’ll be honest, I can’t think about all that. The circling of my thoughts covers a much smaller radius. Over the past few days, for example, I keep thinking about houseplants. I miss them. It’s illegal now to have any, and what I wouldn’t give for a little potted anthruirum—they hardly require water!—or even just a snake plant. You can do thirty days for having one of those. It’s cactuses only, and even there, only certain kinds are permitted. You wouldn’t think it’d make much of a difference, not to be able to have indoor plants, but it does. Oh, it does.

When I’m not thinking about plants, I think a lot about bathing. A long, hot shower would be sublime. I dream of showers now the way I used to dream of the children’s father in the first months after he was gone: waking with a deep, cavernous longing for something so absurdly out of reach that it feels ridiculous to think of it, even in a dream. Showering was one area where I was pretty wasteful in the before times, I’ll admit. I’d stand in there for over an hour at a time, letting the steam caress me and the heat take my breath away, and crying, always crying, so hard that my salty tears merged indistinguishably with the stream from the tap, becoming the same heavy, endless flow. I’d stop only when the hot stream had run over me for so long I’d feel I was about to faint, or 56

choke—and then I’d step out and shake my body free of all the lingering droplets, letting little puddles accumulate all over the tiles. I would leave the puddles to air-dry slowly, never bothering to wipe them up, even though I would often slip unexpectedly as I crossed back and forth across the large marble floor of our master bathroom.

Now, I take a ten-second bird bath at the sink once a week, but only when the kids aren’t watching, or else they’ll want to take one too. They don’t need it, young as they are. Our day for household showering is the third Sunday of the month. Like the houseplant thing, you can do time for violating this: thirty days for showering out of turn, even on the first offense. No leniency. A second offense and you’ll go away for a year. Anna, our neighbor back at the house, suffered from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder her entire life, since she was a little girl. She had to wash her hands at least once every hour, for all the years we lived next to her. If she couldn’t wash her hands, she’d panic, go short of breath, start to wheeze, and rip at her cuticles until they bled. She’s away now. Doing fifteen years for repeated offenses. Things have been hard for people like her.

Things have been hard for all of us, though. Jonah keeps saying he misses the rain, a comment that strikes me as almost comical, because he doesn’t even know what rain is. He’s seven, which means he’s never seen a real day of rain in his life. I showed him a video on my cell that I took over a decade ago, down in Savannah, of a real rainstorm, sheets of rain coming straight down from the sky like dozens of panes of glass being dropped all at once from a rooftop. His eyes widened in the same way they do when he’s watching a horror movie. After that, he kept going on about the rain: when is it coming, how come it never rains like it did in the video, don’t you think it looks like 57

maybe it’ll rain today? He’d started to sound less like a little boy and more like an old man with dementia. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the rain isn’t coming, just like you wouldn’t tell an old man in a nursing home that his sweetheart, dead for thirty years, isn’t coming today either.

Lili doesn’t mind as much about the rain itself, but I know she worries about other things. She’s ten, so she can remember some real rainfalls. But she’s also old enough to remember when we started finding dead birds by the dozens in our backyard, their red and blue and brown bodies scattered like colorful drops of paint across the green grass. She can remember when we had to switch from the supermarket, with its dizzying array of aisles and brands and choices, to the rationing station and its long lines of tired, angry people. She can remember when we first found out they were instituting assigned days for showering.

Lili loved bath time as a baby. She never cried, never fussed or squirmed. She’d sit in the tub while I shampooed her soft, silken strands of jet black baby hair, head tilted back and eyes closed, like a suburban housewife having her scalp massaged at an upscale salon. She’d protest when it was time to get out, splashing me lightly. As I toweled her dry, she’d pop the tiny, iridescent bubbles that still clung to her baby-soft skin and giggle with delight. Many times in her first year, it was these little giggles that brought me back from moments of depression so deep, so all-consuming, that I forgot I was bathing my daughter and could think only of drowning myself in that tub. Water could be an escape, too.

We had to leave home right after Lili’s third birthday. I was 58

eight months pregnant with Jonah and every inch of my body was swollen and aching with the heft of my basketball-sized belly. Packing up the little we could take and moving halfway across the country was not how I had pictured the final weeks of the pregnancy, but there was no choice in the matter. Everyone was going.

The displacements and resettlements have been challenging for the children, but it’s not just that. This is our seventh resettlement since we left home that first year, and each time we are displaced, I worry more and more that the next time we have to migrate, there won’t be any place left for us to resettle. The hostility among those who got to this place first is palpable, thick as the dense, hot air, like you could cut right into it.

I understand their anger. I do. If I had been here first, I would be a pitbull about it, all teeth and snarl to protect my turf. But because I didn’t get here first, I have to pretend like I don’t understand. As new arrivals, we try to guilt the already-settled, calling them selfish and inhumane, hoping to coax them into sharing some of their supplies with us.

They don’t share, though. Why would they?

I wouldn’t.

Thirst makes a monster of all of us.

Just before lunch, Lili and Jonah came in from outside and flopped down on the ragged futon with their iPads, both of them slick with sweat. A few minutes later, Lili glanced up from her screen and said, “Mom, there’s a dead lady outside.”

“What?”

“There’s a dead lady outside,” she repeated, and then put her 59

headphones over her ears.

“Outside where?”

I didn’t understand why her voice was so calm, matter-offact, why her brother wasn’t saying anything at all, why they were both already buried in their devices like seeing a dead lady was no more unusual than seeing a live one.

“Right outside,” Jonah said wearily, “on the street. Just go look.”

I ran to draw the blinds and saw the crowd gathered just up the road. I glanced back at the kids, still seemingly uninterested in what they had just reported, and then raced out the door and up the street. I stopped just short of the gathered crowd to listen, not quite sure what to expect.

“Must’ve been dehydration. Damn near 130 degrees out today,” said a tall, bony man wearing a wide-brimmed hat. “There’s no station anywhere around here, either. Not surprising.”

“Water stations aren’t for settlement folks. What do they care if we’re dying in the streets?” another man shot back. I could see bits of spittle flying from his mouth and glinting in the sunlight as he spoke.

I pushed my way to where the woman was splayed on the hot concrete, dozens of people swarming around her lifeless body. She was in her mid-60s, around my mother’s age. She was dressed simply but neatly, and her makeup was done, curled eyelashes and lined brows; but her lips were cracked open and caked with thick, worm-like strings of dried blood. Her skin was translucent, and it looked like you could unwrap her, peel her body like a banana to reveal the pulpy organs beneath.

“How long has she been here?” I asked.

“Most of the morning,” a young man standing next to me 60

replied. He leered over her body, peering down at it as if he were examining some especially interesting artifact in a glass case at a museum.

“Most of the morning? It’s 11:30! Why hasn’t anyone come for her?”

“Who’s going to come?” the man asked, brusque laughter in his voice. “Who’s got energy to spare on a job like this, on a day like today?”

“So what, then, they’re going to leave a corpse in the street?” I asked, aware of how my voice was rising, a screeching sound I hated.

“Till dusk they are. That’s how they do it around here. Unless you want to drag that body away yourself.”

He looked up at me then, his eyes twinkling playfully. “Ever dragged a dead body before? Makes you real thirsty.”

I dreamt of her that night. I dreamt of bringing her body back to life, a kind of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but instead of air, it was water, water flowing from my mouth to hers, life-giving water, filling her lungs, rushing through her veins, her heart and mine both bursting to full, spilling over until the water flowed out of us both like a sea.

The next morning, I caught Jonah at the tap, filling a tiny bottle cap.

“Jonah! What on earth? Why?”

He startled and flipped the cap over, the droplets scattering 61

across the countertop. I rushed to save them, realized it was useless, stopped.

“There’s a dragonfly,” he said quietly, a note of sorrow in his boyish voice. “It can’t move. I think it’s dying. It must be thirsty. I wanted it to have something to drink while it dies.”

I stared at him, aghast. I felt myself boiling with rage. I wanted to shake him, slap him.

“Jonah.” He looked away from me guiltily. “Yesterday, just yesterday, you passed a dead woman in the street without a blink of an eye, and now you’re wasting water on a dragonfly.”

“It’s not a waste,” Jonah muttered.

“It is a waste, Jonah! You know that water is measured! You can’t just go taking it for whatever you want! For a dragonfly!”

He turned and stomped off, slamming the screen door to our small patch of backyard behind him. I peered out the window and saw him crouching in the dust, looking forlornly at the dying insect. A few moments later, he came in and took a pair of scissors from the cabinet.

“What are you doing with those?” I asked.

“Nothing.” He slammed the door again.

I sighed. No rain again. No water for Jonah’s dragonfly. I remembered my own love affair with hummingbirds as a child, how I would fill our smallest Tupperware containers with sugared water to attract them, dazzled by the shimmering spectrum of color and light wavering across their tiny breasts. I wished then, really wished, that I could give Jonah the cap filled with water, let him aid his dying bug. But he had to learn. Plus, his cavalier disregard for the dead woman in the street still unsettled me. Why was he more concerned with a bug than with her?

I peered out the window again, to where he was still crouched 62

in the dust, only now, he held the dragonfly tightly, its microscopic head cinched between his thumb and pointer finger. With his other hand, he was using the scissors to cut the dragonfly into small, even pieces, starting from the back of the body and moving forward, snipping with the precision of a surgeon. I stood frozen in place. I wanted to call out to him, tell him to stop it immediately, ask him where he had learned to act so cruelly. But I said nothing. I watched him, and when he was finished, I took the plastic bottle cap that sat empty on the counter and flung it across the room, a gesture so small, so pathetic, that it made me laugh amidst my terror.

Outside, Jonah scattered the bits of chopped bug in the dusty grass and then kicked them away angrily.

Lili asked if we could all shower together this Sunday, when it’s our turn. I wasn’t sure how to reply. At ten, Lili’s breasts are already starting to bud, and at seven, Jonah is starting to ask questions about the differences between girl bodies and boy bodies. I pictured all three of us crammed together in that tight, steamy space and thought it might be inappropriate. I don’t know the rules about these sorts of things, and I don’t have any parent friends to ask. I wondered if Lili got the idea from another one of the kids on the settlement.

“Do your friends shower together with their families?”

“I dunno.” Lili shrugged. “I just thought it might be better. We could all stay in a little longer if we went together.”

She was right about that. The three minutes allotted per person were hardly enough time to scrub one’s self over thoroughly. Having nine minutes would be unimaginably lush. Still, 63

though, it would be nine minutes shared with the two of them, their dirty, grubby bodies competing with my space—and my silence—during a ritual that had become near spiritual for me. I looked forward to those three-minute, once-a-month showers with an anticipation I can hardly describe, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to sacrifice it.

I thought about it all day on Saturday. Finally, I decided it was just one shower, one month. If it was awful, we could go back to the old routine next month. As we were eating dinner on Saturday night, I told Lili we’d go through with her plan: the kids should be ready to shower in the morning at ten on the dot, instead of the usual 10:10 for Lili and 10:20 for Jonah. Lili clapped her hands excitedly, but Jonah looked weirded out.

“I don’t want to shower with you guys. I’m the only boy. It’s gross.”

“We’re just going to try it, Jonah,” I said. “The extra time will be nice. You can give that mop a good wash.”

Jonah rolled his eyes, but showed a faint hint of a smile. He brushed away the thick hair that was forever falling over his forehead, making his small, heart-shaped face look even smaller.

In the early morning, for just a few moments, it actually looked like it might rain. I knew it wouldn’t, of course—it didn’t feel like rain in any way—but when I first looked out at the sky, it had that foreboding look, slate gray and heavy, and the sun had yet to burn off all the clouds. I tried to wake Jonah up to see, but his grumbled protests made clear that he wasn’t interested. Looks like rain isn’t rain.

I decided to let them sleep a while longer. They could eat after we showered. I spent the next hour trying to make things a little special. Not special as in how-things-used-to-be special. Just a 64

little better than usual, I guess. I dug out three ragged bathrobes from the garbage bag of clothes we kept in a corner. Two of the robes, originally white but now a dirty, grayish color, were mine from stays in maternity wards. The other, navy blue, belonged to the kids’ father, before he was gone. I wondered for a moment if we shouldn’t use that one and then decided, to hell with it, we carried it all the way here. I placed all three robes outside on the front rail, where the sun, now blazing brightly through the last of the morning clouds, would heat them up while we showered. I stirred eggs and sand-like pancake batter in a little bowl, trying to ignore that the eggs smelt a little off, and wishing I could add something else to the mixture to thin it. I placed the bowl away in the fridge for after the shower, and set the table with three plastic plates, remembering the beautiful, hand-painted ceramic dining set we lost in the first displacement. I looked at the red plastic plates atop the small, foldaway table and longed so deeply for an elegant vase filled with freshly-cut flowers that I had to laugh at myself. The kids wouldn’t even understand the concept.

At around 9:30, I went back into their room. They’re both sleeping later and later these days, part of their ongoing transformation into surly, aloof little people who act as if I am not their mother, but a strange, slightly bothersome woman they share a house with. I wondered again if this was weird, inappropriate, what we were about to do. But I kept thinking about those nine minutes, and I woke them up.

“Almost time to shower!” I trilled, aware that I sounded much bubblier than I felt, as if I were waking them for Christmas morning—or a rainstorm—and not the strange experience of getting naked and washing themselves alongside a sibling and a parent.

Lili rolled over, emerging from sleep, and murmured, “I can’t wait for the extra time.”

“This is gonna be disgusting,” Jonah said, from under the blanket he had pulled over his head.

I laughed. “It’s going to be lovely. Get ready.”

Our designated times for showering began at 10:00am on the third Sunday of every month. Normally, I would turn on the water at exactly 10:00 and bathe until 10:03. By 10:04, I was out and toweling off, so Lili could enter and prepare for her shower, which she took from exactly 10:10 to 10:13. She was out by 10:14, and then Jonah would get ready for his 10:20 slot. If we were late, or if there was a hiccup in the process, we had to either skip the showers or pay a fine. The kids knew we could not afford either option, and they were as used to the routine as I was. By 9:55, we were all ready to go, time now to spare. We gathered in the narrow hallway outside the bathroom door, looking awkwardly at one another. Lili, noticing the robes in my arms, reached out and silently fingered the worn fabric of the navy blue one. Jonah stared at the robe as his sister touched it, but said nothing.

At 9:57, I went into the bathroom and placed the robes, still warm from the sun, on top of the toilet seat in a neat pile. I shyly removed my clothes, and then motioned for the children to come in and do the same, but they didn’t move. I sighed and put my phone on the sink top, watching it hawkishly. The instant the screen flicked to 10:00am, I reached for the shower knob. But for once, I did not rush. I turned the knob slowly, caressingly. It felt heavenly in my hand.

But no water came out.

I heard a tiny sound, a sharp gasp, and realized the sound was my own.

Where was the water?

The kids crowded in behind me.

“What’s happening?” Lili asked, and already I could hear that she was afraid.

“I don’t know, honey. Probably nothing. We might just need a plumber. But go turn on the news and check, okay?”

Lili stayed where she was, staring at my hand, which still held the shower knob, but was now clenching it tightly, no longer a tender caress. Jonah looked from me, to the knob, and back to me with an unnerving glare before retreating to the living room. I heard the TV come on.

“Channel 5!” I called out to him.

When he didn’t respond, I hollered again. “Anything? What are they saying?”

He came back into the bathroom, feet dragging.

“Water’s off.”

“What? Why?”

“I dunno, Mom. I came back in here to tell you what they said. No water in the whole settlement as of midnight last night.”

I threw on the navy blue robe, glancing at Lili as I tied its belt around my waist. Her eyes were so wide. I looked away.

“Go listen to what they’re saying, Jonah, while I keep fiddling with this.”

But I knew fiddling was pointless, that we did not need a plumber, that I had lied to Lili again, so I dropped my hand from the knob and walked out of the bathroom. Lili trailed silently behind me.

On the news, a blond-haired woman wearing a coral dress and white high heels was talking loudly at the camera.

“…executive order went into effect as of midnight, after an announcement was released last week.”

“Announcement?” I said incredulously. “What announce67

ment?”

Jonah glowered at me, scorn contorting his face, like I had missed an emergency alert text warning us about this: stupid woman, incompetent mother, what would we do now? But this was not the first time, not the first settlement. Water had been stripped away from us without notice before: here one day, gone the next.

I went outside, still in the blue bathrobe, and knew then, for sure, that I hadn’t missed an emergency alert. The streets were churning, brimming with folks’ anger and their rage. Their thirst. Nobody had known the water would be turned off. Few were prepared. It would not be coming back on until Tuesday, almost seventy-two hours from now. Many people didn’t have enough to drink in the meantime. Some of them would die of thirst. These inevitabilities were frightening but not unfamiliar to the settlers. They knew there was nothing to be done. The performance of their rage was simply a habit, a hollow gesture. It was a waste of energy, really. They shouldn’t parch their throats like that, I thought.

I allowed myself to think then of the ten gallons I had purchased from an illegal vendor during the first week we arrived here, meeting him in the pre-dawn darkness on the settlement’s western outskirts. It had been sheer luck that I had crossed paths with him during our last migration, and luckier still that I’d been able to connect with him again upon resettling. He charged me an exorbitant price—$80 a gallon—and issued a series of sternly whispered threats about what would happen to me and my children if I told anyone where I had gotten them, his piercing eyes holding my gaze like magnets as he spoke. I paid him, promised to keep quiet, and fled, pushing my cart as quickly as I could through tangles of brush that scratched at my 68

arms and chest. I hid the gallons in the half-collapsed shed set away in a corner of our yard, finishing just as the sun had started to rise. My body had trembled furiously as I secured the shed door with a padlock, walked inside, and, still covered in dirt and dust, collapsed into bed, where I stayed shaking for hours on end, long after daylight had blazed through my window.

Now, I felt vindicated. It had been worth it. I was right to take the risk. We would be safe.

Wordlessly, I turned my back on the street and went inside.

Lili was sobbing, which irritated me, because heavy, prolonged crying can cause dehydration. Of course, the kids are perpetually dehydrated—we all are—but I couldn’t afford to have it getting any worse at a time like this.

“Lili, you have to stop. It’s okay. They’re going to turn the water back on. Everything’s going to be fine.”

She looked up at me. “I’m sorry for the dead woman,” she whispered.

“The what?”

“The dead woman. I’m sorry for her.” She paused and let out a hiccup. “I’m sorry she’s dead. And I’m sorry Jonah and I kicked her.”

“You kicked her?”

Lili started crying more loudly. Jonah looked up from his iPad and rolled his eyes at his sister, letting out an exasperated puff of air, as if he knew all along that she would give away their secret. For the second time in two days, I felt a chill run down my spine watching my cold, callous child. How had he become this way? My love for him was the deepest well, but I had to 69

reach deeper down into it each time to touch water.

“Jonah, honey,” I said to him, guiltily deciding to bypass the dead woman and the kicking for now, “do you want to watch that video of the rainstorm?”

“No,” he replied instantly.

“What rainstorm?” Lili asked.

I realized she had never seen the video, and suddenly, I felt desperately, acutely, that I did not want to show it to her. I waited, silent, letting Lili’s question linger in the air.

“Some dumb video Mom has on her phone,” Jonah said. “It’s like, a hundred years old and really blurry.”

Sweet boy. Good, good boy.

“Oh. Sounds boring.” Lili plugged her iPad into the wall, and, still snuffling, slumped over the side of the futon while she waited for it to charge. Her brother continued to flick, scroll, flick.

“I’m going outside again for a while,” I told them then. “Stay here. I want to check in with some of the neighbors.”

“We don’t have ‘neighbors,’ Mom,” Lili muttered, without looking up. Jonah said nothing, keeping his eyes locked on his iPad. Flick, scroll. Flick, scroll.

I stood silently, staring at them. They reminded me of little glass dolls, and without warning, I suddenly envisioned smashing them to bits. I grabbed my phone and went out to the backyard, letting the screen door slam loudly behind me.

I had lost time.

It happens often. It’s a trauma response. Black holes, dark voids, nothing there while I’m gone, nothing there when I get 70

back. Had I been standing out there for a minute? An hour? Three hours? I looked back through the door and saw the kids were still on the futon, clutching their devices. No way of telling by looking at them. I looked up at the sky. No sun. It looked like rain again, actually. Mocking Jonah. Mocking me.

However long I had been out there, the kids hadn’t seemed to mind my absence. They knew I wasn’t going to come back with any news. There was nothing to report beyond the obvious. They had no expectations that I could change this for them in any way. Stupid woman. Incompetent mother.

Across the tiny stretch of land at the back of our house, near the shed, was a rust-colored picnic table. It looked like it had been there for about a hundred years. Lopsided and wobbly, the corners of its tabletop were crumbling away, and a thick moss had spread up the legs of its benches. It didn’t look steady enough to sit on or use for eating. But it looked welcoming, like something warm I remembered from my past. I walked across the yard, got down on all fours, and crawled under the table.

The tabletop created a canopy over my head that made the world feel soft and dark. I thought about Jonah, and Lili, the blue bathrobe, the shower knob, the dead woman in the street, and I decided to give in. I let my body lose time again. I ceased fighting the drowning feeling and allowed myself to be pulled under, into the depths of a blank nothingness. I waited for it to wash over me fully, to seize me in its grip and drag me away. As I stared up at the bottom of the picnic table from where I lay in the grass and the dirt, I sensed my vision blurring, my hearing falling away, my arms and legs going numb. Then I was gone.

When I awoke, it was dark. Dark enough to know that this time it had been hours, not moments. But the kids still hadn’t come looking for me. I was thirsty, so thirsty. I rolled out from 71

under the table and looked up at the sky. No rain. Not Savannah all those years ago. Here. Now. This.

I wanted to scream then, to hurl my body against the rotting wood of the heavy table again and again, until it was annihilated. I thought of the dragonfly, its carcass scattered in chopped bits somewhere nearby, and envied its bliss.

Pulling myself up from the ground, I brushed clumps of grass from my thighs and the backs of my arms, realizing in doing so that I had been feasted upon by mosquitos. Fresh bites were popping up all over. I also realized I had been crying. I could taste the salty traces of the water that had run down my cheeks and over my lips. How long had I been out here? I walked to the screen door and peered in. It was dark, but I could make out the sleeping shapes of Lili and Jonah on the futon, still in the same spots I’d left them. I thought of how thirsty they must be. I wanted to wake them up with a cool drink of water, ice cubes tinkling against the sides of the glass, and let them take turns gulping it down. Instead, I opened the door as quietly as possible and slipped past them, down the hallway to the bathroom.

The two grayish bathrobes were still sitting on top of the toilet. I thought again of the reserve gallons in the shed. We would need some of them to get us through the next few days, but maybe I could use just one now, to wash up, and soak my aching feet. There were nine others, after all. I stood for a few moments, hesitating, before telling myself I ought to at least go check on them, make sure that the padlock was still in place.

I tiptoed back down the hallway, moving with painstaking care past the children as they slept, and slipped out the back door. The night was blanketed with a hot, heavy silence, and it was even darker than when I had awoken under the picnic table. There were no stars. I scampered to the shed and struggled with 72

the padlock in the darkness, using my cell phone as a flashlight. Once inside the stifling, windowless room, I ran to pull aside the crates I had stacked in front of the gallons to hide them. They were there, all ten of them. I stared at the gleaming plastic jugs, feeling my stomach flip. I wished there were more: thirty, or fifty. But there were only ten. I knew then, without wanting to know, what I had come here to do with them. I knew I would not use just one.

For the next hour, I surreptitiously smuggled the gallons from the shed to the house in the noiseless night, feeling like a burglar, or a raccoon. Once they were all scattered around me in the kitchen, my sacred, illicit bounty, I heated gallon after gallon on the stove until each one boiled, then carried the heavy steel pot down the hallway to the bathroom, where I transferred the water into the tub. Along the way, droplets sloshed over the side of the pot and spilled to the carpet. I smiled at this, relishing the waste.

When the process was finally complete, I stood gazing over the tub in awe. My arms ached and I was covered in a thick layer of sweat that pooled under my breasts and trickled down my ribs and the backs of my knees. Ten gallons hadn’t been nearly enough to fill the tub; in fact, the water was no more than a few inches deep. But staring down into that pool of crystalline liquid felt like standing on the shore of a vast ocean. I stripped my clothes off, pulled up the video of the Savannah rainstorm on my phone, and sunk my body into the water, already lukewarm, but reverent nonetheless. I walked my feet and legs out of the tub and up the bathroom wall, so I could submerge my torso, shoulders, and neck more fully. I watched as my breasts slipped under, only the tips of my nipples still poking out above the water’s surface. I slipped down further, until my lips and nose 73

were covered, and then reached out to where my phone sat on the tub’s edge and pressed play on the video, letting the sounds of rainfall surround me. I closed my eyes, balled my hands into fists which I placed firmly over my chest, and waited for darkness.

I thought of hour-long showers.

I thought of rain falling down in sheets from the Georgia sky.

I thought of steam, tears, streams, choking me, freeing me.

I did not think of the children.

I did not think of the danger I had put them in.

I did not think of what would happen tomorrow.

I thought of the dead woman in the street, but I did not think about how the children had kicked her. I did not picture her cracked, blood-strewn lips, or the way the heat from the concrete had shimmered and danced around her corpse. I saw only the heavens raining down on her, thick, heavy, rivulets of rain, and her body rising up alongside mine, light as a feather, stiff as a board, to the skies.