Water in the Well

2 Ray

The sun hung overhead like a watchful parent.

“There, it’s right there, Ray, pay attention—come on,” Dan said rolling his eyes at her.

Ray couldn’t see the eye-roll; she was focused on the bucket. Her brown hair was cut to her shoulder, and her deep brown eyes never moved away from the bucket. For siblings, they were remarkably opposite. Dan was tall with intense dark eyes, while Ray was short with big doe-like eyes stuck in a perpetual expressionless state. They were both kissed by the sun, but Ray grew golden with her hours of exposure, while Dan just darkened. Really, only the color of their hair and eyes betrayed their genetic kinship, that, and the way they walked. It was a rapid, determined pace—a pace with somewhere to go and something to do.

Dan was shaking his leg impatiently. “Come on, come on, let me try, again.” He pressed closer to her.

“Stop,” she shoved him with her elbow, “give me some space, Dan. You had your chance and you didn’t get nothing.” After a moment, Ray threw up her hands and threw the rope aside. “It’s a mirage. I told you, idiot. The sun is playing tricks on us.”

“No—no!”

“Yes, Dan,” Ray said. She swiped the bag from the ground leaning on the well and blasted away. “Grab the bucket and let’s get out of here.”

Dan whisked the rope from one side of the well to the other. Nothing. In a sudden burst of anger, he pulled up the bucket with all the force frustration beget. Once the bucket was up, he coiled the rope between his elbow and hand and went after Ray.

“Wait for me,” he shouted after Ray.

Ray ignored him. She continued walking in the punishing sun forging ahead to another invisible point on the horizon. The land, yellow tinted and barren rolling hills, was dead; a heap of blackened trunks, grey ash, empty, bulldozed leftover husks of houses, and the ever-present stench of burnt oil.

Ray always tried to keep clean, but her finger nails were black and she couldn’t remove the scum from her palms as she walked away. The more she rubbed her hands together the blacker they became. Everything was coated in layers of oily ash. After the many years of the oil field fires, it was a surprise there was anything alive here but there was, and the oilers, as the outside world referred to them despectively, scavenged through what was left of the city. Dan was never clean. His face was full of dark streaks where he had poked at it. He lay a hand on Ray’s shoulder when he caught up with her.

She shrugged him away. “Stop you’re going to dirty my shirt.”

“Where are you heading now?” Dan said.

“I don’t know,” Ray said as her eyes scanned the horizon straight ahead.

Dan stopped walking. He looked all around him and stayed still allowing the noon-sun to roast him.

Ray stopped also. “What are you doing?” She asked without turning to look back at him.

Dan’s voice was low, “I have been thinking, about—do you ever wonder what’s out East?”

“No,” Ray shook her head, “It’s just not a place for us, for people like us.”

“How do you know Ray? How can you be sure?” He bent down and drew an arrow in the ash.

“Mom and dad—”

He didn’t let her finish. “I don’t remember them, and I don’t want their life. How long did they live? Huh? Were they even 20, before the coughing got them?”

“They were happy,” Ray said turning towards Dan.

“No they weren’t,” Dan said still doodling in the ash, “how many children did they loose before you and before me? And you just hit…” His voice trailed off.

“I should start bearing already—at least trying, but I can’t bring myself to hook up with a random guy. It’s not how it happened to mom and dad.” Ray bit her lip. She didn’t know if that was entirely true. In fact, she was having trouble remembering their parents also. They had died so long ago and she had been so young.

“We need to move East,” Dan repeated, “They have drugs there, even if our lungs are black, they can fix them. I don’t want to die.”

“Why are you speaking like this?” Ray had made her way to her brother.

“Yeah, there’s blood, um…” His voice quivered for a moment and he fell silent.

“Oh Dan,” Ray fell to her knees and embraced him, “it’s too early, you’re too young.”

“They did it to save the world, but what about us?” Dan said sadly.

“Listen, forget what I said before, let’s go East. We’ll sneak cross the border, we’ll clean up, and we’ll go among the Coastal Elites. We can pass as any of them. It can’t be that hard. Mom used to say that the hospitals were free there. All you had to do was present yourself and they would treat you with wonderful drugs that we couldn’t begin to imagine.”

Dan took a deep breath. “You think so sis?” He looked up at her the way only a preadolescence can inhabit both childhood and adulthood.

Ray stood up and extended her hand to Dan. He took it standing up himself.

“Yes,” Ray said, “I do.”

They started walking east heading back in the direction of the well they had just left behind. On the ground, in the rough letters of a much younger child, the wind already had half erased Dan’s writing: “D n R.”