[Wk14] Parched
Dillan let the water genie run its hands over his face. Dozens of turquoise tendrils at the ends of its equally blue palms flitted over Dillan’s shuttered eyes and pinched lips. Its smooth, featureless, head hovered eagerly above its tendrils as it worked. The water genie extracted a laugh with its usual seamless ease; Dillan collected his gallon of water feeling no different without the throaty guffaw he’d let the genie siphon from him. The water genie flew into its bottle shaped nest, leaving drops of sated moisture in a quickly-dried trail behind it.
Dillan walked home, nodding and smiling grimly at his neighbors in line for water exchanges with the genies. He remembered his parents’ rage when their institute was denied funding for research advances in creating and maintaining potable water. But the emotional siphon demanded by the genies paired with the perpetual fuzz of slight dehydration quickly stifled his parents’ edge, and his last memories of them were muted and meek like their eventual approach to survival. The ensuing decade had thusly lurched across the dying planet without much resistance.
Most folks claimed they could feel a difference after each bartered smile or laugh, depending on how much water they needed. Dillan was lucky; he and his older sister, Deidra, managed on a gallon a week for drinking, and the rare spare quart for their monthly washcloth scrub-downs. They took turns bartering, and neither of them noticed the incremental decreases in their humors as the months thickened since their parents’ passing.
When Deidra started complaining of thirst, one gray September afternoon, Dillan nodded and bartered for an extra gallon of water that week. He felt it. He told Deidra it was intense for a second, like the world would end, and then he immediately forgot why he cared. He said he felt weird for a few paces on the return trip, but was back to himself before he’d traveled the length of the barter line. Deidra smiled and drank a gallon of water in one sitting.
Deidra awoke the next morning, gray like the light, and surly. She curled into a ball in her bed and refused to ready her goods for food bartering at the market that day. Dillan checked her temperature, gathered both of their items, and went to market for both of them. He returned with extra creases around his tired eyes, and a fresh gallon of water. He said nothing of the trade for it. Deidra drank all of that, too.
The following day, Dillan carried his now barely mobile sister to the hospital. The doctors there told them it was The Wasting Disease and the only known aid was water.
“Sometimes folks shake it off after a few weeks, especially if they stay hydrated,” they consoled.
“There should be a cure in five years!” they promised, as though five years was feasible. Dillan scoffed at these chirpy doctors who were too busy worrying about their next sip to be concerned with his fading sister. Deidra rasped weakly that she was thirsty. Her cheekbones made dark, cozy, mouse-sized niches above her clenched jaw, and the skin under her eyes was a dark curtain on the white walls of abandoned hope. Dillan asked for medicine, for treatment.
The doctors reminded him water was his best bet, but here are some pain reducers. Dillan muttered something about hospitals handing out Tylenol like it was a diagnosis.
Deidra insisted that she be the one to pay for her treatment. She had Dillan drag her to the barter line, and leaned on his shoulder while the turquoise tendrils did their thing. The water genie shook its head, though, and waved them off. A translator called to them,
“The sick do not have the luxury of giving their affections to the water genies. The water genies do not take from the sick.”
Dillan laughed and smiled every day for the water genies, after that. He got his sister through weeks on his joy alone. But his sister didn’t improve; his joy was not enough. So Dillan gave them his tears. His woe bought him gallons of water he’d never dared to imagine, let alone achieve. He wept for months and believed his sadness had no bottom. His hopes began to rise and he wondered if his newfound optimism would replenish his joy.
Deidra crept to two gallons a day. She had shrunk to bones and whispers, which let Dillan ignore her attempts to thwart the water sacrifices he made.
Time trickled till Dillan awoke to the first spring light, the first blanket of gold to coat the floor of their house through their open windows. He rushed eagerly to the barter line, and let the water genie take as much despair as it could handle from him. He left with his little wagon filled with gallons of water, the stark jealousy and horror of his neighbors piled high across his back as he left. He had never felt lighter.
Deidra was dead when he returned. She lay, wrinkled and wasted, across the dingy sheets of her bed, her face relieved for the first time since the disease took her.
Dillan put his hand on her scrawny cold arm, and lay his head next to hers. He wondered if he would want the rest of his days, without her to meander their length with him. He thought about the emptiness that would consume him, and he waited for his eyes to fill.
He lay for several hours next to his sister, breathless for grief that never came. His eyes were dry, and so was his heart. And he knew, in his stale aftermath, that his sister had not died because she was dehydrated; she had died because water was not enough.
