Water. The word bubbles in my head, boils in my eardrums, stretches my skull until my parched mouth gasps for breath and my dirt-caked hands squeeze my temples until the voice softens to a dull whisper. Water.
We live in a deserted desert town, a middle-of-nowhere kind of place, in a perennial drought. But the scarcity of water, once an appealing challenge, is now proving itself dangerous.
My first memory is of a rainstorm. I must have been four, maybe five years old, and it was an early spring morning enveloped in heavy, almost suffocating, air. The expansive sky choked under a thick layer of blackish gray clouds, swirling and shuffling above our sandy lawns and far out into the dead of the desert. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the sky; no one could. We all stood outside our sand-covered homes, waiting and praying, holding a collective breath within our dust-lined lungs. And then, in a sudden burst, the clouds let go, striking our waiting faces with pellets of water, clear and beautiful and clean.
And, as if a switch was turned on, we all started jumping and screaming and laughing at once, scrambling for pots and tubs and pans and whatever else would hold the blessed water.
And me, I paraded to the muddy middle of the one road in town, tilting my chin up to the splotchy sky and opening my mouth wide. And I drank and drank, twirling in delight, the raindrops creating rivers in the dirt on my face and on my arms. It was a long time before my mother came to carry me home and out of my stormy paradise.
“Why can’t the sky be sad more often?” I asked my mother as she tucked me in that night.
“I don’t know; why, sweetie?” she queried, leaning down to kiss my scrubbed-clean forehead.
“Because,” I explained through a content yawn, my voice only a drop louder than the rampant rain drumming the rooftop. “When the clouds cry, we can be happy.”
The clouds haven’t cried in two years. Our front yard, once sandy and smooth, is caked and cracked and wrinkled, a deformed grandfather of what it used to be. My mouth is painted over with dust, and there’s no water to wash it clean. I choke every time I breathe, and the more I heave, the more debris enters my already-clogged throat. Our water well, overflowing after that first storm, is now near bone dry.
The only water we often see is salty and sad, leaking from the mournful eyes of those bold enough to cry. And the moment their waiting tongues catch their teardrops, they immediately stop weeping, transfixed by the enchanting taste of refreshing albeit briny relief.
I am not a crier. I am a hoper, a crazed believer, an unrealistic dreamer; my head in the nonexistent clouds that we all wish would streak the haunting blue sky with shades of grey.
And so, every evening, when the stars slowly splash across the swirling black sky and the moonlight spills in pale puddles across the town, I walk, relishing the cool, feathery air, to a garden.
My mother calls me crazy. It’s impossible, she says, for fruit to bloom from this cursed, sandy soil.
If we can barely survive, my father adds, how do you expect the vegetables to?
I can’t water the plants nearly enough. But I still come every night to the garden, patting the marked plot of dusty earth with my chapped fingers, hoping that tomorrow, my plants would wriggle their way into the dry desert air.
There is only one other person that ever comes to the garden—Mrs. Winslow, an older woman that lives a few houses down from my own. It’s a rare occasion if I see her in the garden, hovering over her bare square of land, smoothing the dirt and smiling at me. I grin back, and together we watch the inkblot of twilight stretch across the sky, spreading a haphazard collection of stars in its wake. The same thought always echoes in the depths of our collective mind. Water.
I wish and wish, crossing my fingers and squeezing my eyes shut, that clouds above would bless the small seeds I had planted far below the surface of the Earth.
The sky doesn’t respond. It is content, gauzy and blue, to watch us discover new meanings of misery.
The town, if possible, gets drier. We frantically search for water, underground and in the depths of our unaccommodating wells, but all we dig up is more dust that buffers the tender space between our fingers and nails, proving nearly impossible to scrape out.
Black storm clouds soar over the town the next afternoon. We all stand outside, praying. But they leave as soon as they arrive, bound to water some other lucky place, leaving us miserably downtrodden as we sulk our way back inside.
It is as dry as ever when I slowly drag myself to the garden on a late August afternoon. My temples throb from the fierceness of the sun’s pulsating glow and unforgiving torridity of the air, even at night. Sand surrounds me in cyclones as I kick up the dust in the road, twirling halfheartedly in the same spot I did so many years ago when I felt rain for the first time. I get dizzy and my headache worsens, so I move on.
When the dust storm I brew finally subsides, the garden folds at once before my stinging eyes.
I swoon when I first see it, and fall onto the burning ground. I blink once, then twice, and then all of a sudden, I cry and cry.
I am not a crier. But my garden, my dust-covered plot of desert dirt, has blossomed nothing short of a miracle—a dozen tiny green sprouts, frail yet resolute, peek out of the ground and for the first time, taste the sweet flavor of the cool evening breeze, wafting dust and dirt and magic underneath a dark, wondrous sky.
My parents can’t believe it. “What water did you use to coax the plants out from underground?” they ask.
“Barely any,” I reply, and we all stand at the garden in a small, shell-shocked line, chins dropped and mouths wide open to the dust in the whipping wind.
My plants continue to bloom, and I walk to Mrs. Winslow’s house to tell her the good news. She doesn’t respond to my loud, pressing knocks. When my knuckles begin aching from rapping on the door, I begrudgingly turn towards home.
But just before I spin away from Mrs. Winslow’s front steps and onto the road, something sparkling and fluorescent green catches my eye amidst the mounds of sandy nothingness in her backyard.
My ratty sneakers carve a cautious trail around the side of the house until I’m standing at the foot of a bright green watering can. And inside, there are still a few clear, unmistakable drops clinging to the fluorescent spout. Water.
I pace around the can, my eyes glued to the earth. And just a few feet away, camouflaged and looking like just another gap in the ground, is a large, deep well. It is empty, but the sides are still damp enough to believe that there was water inside only recently.
I run home. My parents are reading at the kitchen table when I crash through the front door.
“Where’s Mrs. Winslow?” I demand.
“You haven’t heard?” my father says, looking up from his novel. “She left town this past evening, saying that her well was all dry.” He laughs to himself. “Must be crazy. Everyone else’s for miles around is bone dry, too. Has been for weeks!” Still chuckling, his gaze returns to the open page on his lap.
“No,” I whisper softly to myself. “No!” I repeat, screaming the word like it is something burning in my lungs, scorching my throat and spraying sparks off the tip of my tongue. Sprinting, I fumble my way outside until I find myself on that same stretch of road, right in the middle of the sandy pavement.
And I think to myself, the birth of those plants wasn’t a miracle at all.
That night, I dream of water. Swiftly sluicing down slippery rocks in riverbeds; crashing down in heavy sheets from bloated clouds; whispering and ticking in a soft, spraying mist. Behind my closed eyelids, my mind sees rushing waterfalls and swirling ocean waves, cresting and crashing on damp, sandy shores.
The last thing I dream before a certain pounding wakes me up is a sporadic sprinkle of water exiting a bright green can and touching the leaves and stems and roots of a dozen little plants in a sandy square of bone-dry desert.
When I open my eyes, a loud drumming greets my ears. My mother screams my name, and I leap out of bed and race outside.
Finally cracked like an eggshell, the sky spills its precious yolk on our homes, our wells, our disbelieving faces. We jump and scream and laugh, scrambling for pots and pans and for the arms of family, embracing us and spinning us around in the swirling storm.
And me, I run in the slippery wet sand to the spot where I danced that first rainstorm. When I run right past it without stopping, I don’t look back. I finally skid to a halt at the garden, my lungs gasping for a share of damp, heavy breath.
My plants relish in the rain, and I laugh with them, leaping and singing and shouting.
“Look!” I say breathlessly to them, combing my soaking, tangled hair away from my forehead with my fingers. I tilt my entire face up to the grey-black clouds, whispering a quiet “thank you” for them to carry to Mrs. Winslow in her new home, hoping that wherever she is proves to be a wet paradise. “Water.”