Parched

by Melanie Crowder

  Sarel twisted her hands behind her.

  She didn’t want to be reminded of the night before, of the hours she’d spent scrabbling in the dirt, trying to gather enough stones to pile into rocky graves over the still bodies of her parents, of the ash that had drifted down on the evening breeze and filled in the cracks between the stones.

  She didn’t want to be reminded that her parents had died because of this place. This place that was going to keep Sarel alive whether she wanted it to or not.

  7

  Musa

  Sivo had never taken him out after dark before. Musa cowered in the back seat of the jeep, watching the sun smear the sky red and gold as it sank between the crumbling buildings. They had been out looking for water every day that week, sweeping farther and farther from the shack in the middle of Tandie territory where they kept Musa.

  Where he huddled in the corner, alone, trying not to move so the chains wouldn’t cut into his skin. Alone, except when footsteps scuffled in the dirt and a body crouched on the other side of the wall. When he heard breathing, hiccupped and ragged. Sometimes there was even a voice. A voice he knew as well as his own, whispering his name through the rusted gap in the corrugated steel.

  Sometimes it was a relief to hear that voice. And sometimes it was a relief to be far away, where the voice couldn’t reach him.

  Musa rubbed his eyelid, and a crust of dried dirt sifted to the floor. Even the smallest movement sent spikes of pain shooting through his wrists. It was getting worse. Sivo wouldn’t give him a single cup of water to clean the sores.

  When Musa was little, his mother used to tell stories from when she was a girl, from a time when you only had to turn a handle and water sprayed down on you—hot, cold, and everything in between—just for washing. A time when she and her sisters would run around the neighborhood splashing through the water people sprayed in front of their houses to make the grass turn green.

  Musa and his brother, Dingane, had always laughed at that part, sure she was teasing. The idea—people spraying water into the air because they liked green grass instead of brown.

  For some reason, when the boys laughed at this, it only made their mother sad.

  Musa flinched away from the searing-hot seat buckle that dangled overhead and swung at his bare skin as the jeep rattled down the broken road. He closed his eyes and licked his lips, imagining cool water sprinkling across his face like rain.

  The jeep hit a rut and threw him onto the floor. Musa hit the ground face-first, his arms pinned beneath him. The chains at his wrists bit into raw skin, and he cried out in surprise and pain.

  Sivo jammed the brakes and jumped out. He leaned over the side of the jeep, his large hands gripping the boy around the ribs and hefting him upright. Sivo took one look at the fresh blood leaking down Musa’s hands and cursed.

  “Just my luck.” He felt for the key ring at his waist and unlocked the chains at Musa’s wrists. The metal slid to the floor into a heap like a coiled snake. Sivo jumped into the driver’s seat and tossed a rag into the boy’s lap. “Don’t get your filthy blood all over my seats.”

  Musa held his wrists over the grimy cloth, watching the blood pool on his skin and slide to the back of his wrists, then fall away.

  Why, Dingane? Why?

  The engine choked to life and Musa put his arms out to brace himself against the jeep’s pitching and rolling. The guard in the passenger seat drummed his fingers against the barrel of the rifle that lay across his lap.

  After ten more minutes of bumping and jostling, they pulled over into the shadows a crumbling warehouse cast across a vacant lot. Sivo started to get out of the jeep but the guard shook his head. He spoke for the first time, in a chalky voice. “Not yet. Not until full dark.”

  Musa settled his hands gingerly in his lap and stretched his legs the length of the back seat. He didn’t care why they had stopped, why they were hiding in the shadows like thieves.

  He didn’t care, until he looked up.

  It was the one thing that never changed as they drove from one end of the slums to another. Red scraps of cloth, flags, and ripped T-shirts hung off the corner of roofs, flapping out of windows, and draped over front doors. The mark of Tandie territory.

  Musa squinted. Even in the near dark, he could see that the flag hanging limp from the shattered streetlamp was not red. Cold stole over his skin, down his parched throat, and settled low in his belly.

  Musa’s breath came short and quick. His mind flooded with memories—a door bursting open, shouting, hands reaching, taking. He squeezed his eyes shut, and a small cry slipped through his lips.

  He forced his eyes open again, forced himself to look at the pale cloth, to face what it meant. They had crossed to a part of the city that belonged to another gang.

  There was only one reason they would do something so dangerous. The Tandie were out of water.

  Musa buried his face in the seat cushions. At least it would all be over soon.

  After waiting for half an hour more, Sivo sent Musa out into the empty lot with his dowsing sticks. “Be quick about it,” he whispered.

  Musa walked out alone, his feet shushing across the dirt. The first stars pricked weakly through the dark sky. Musa lifted his arms and settled into his dowsing shuffle.

  The night’s silence pressed in all around him. His heartbeat thundered through his ears and chest and fingertips. Sweat beaded on his upper lip.

  A bat keened high above, and seconds later, Musa felt the breath of air from its thin wings raise the hair on his neck. He paced back and forth across the dirt. He was almost to the far end of the abandoned lot when a faint click echoed across the darkness.

  He paused, one foot hovering inches above the ground, waiting, listening. For a second, everything was silent.

  Crack-crack-crack-crack.

  Flashes erupted from behind the warehouse, and heavy footsteps kicked up gravel.

  A scream ripped through the night, and an answering volley of gunshots echoed across the vacant lot. Musa jumped. He didn’t think. He didn’t look back.

  He dropped his sticks and ran.

  8

  Sarel

  A scattering of rain wet the dust, pinning it to the earth for a little while. Wildflowers sprang up out of the ash, spreading clumps of color along the grotto path. Stubborn desert grasses poked up all over the homestead while Sarel slept in the grotto below, the smell of smoke in her nostrils and gunshots cracking through her dreams.

  Days passed under the bald sun, and the new growth withered, sinking into the scorched earth as if it had never risen at all. Only the sunlight peeking around the curved stairs separated day from night for Sarel, who was torn in and out of dreams, waking to find her cheeks wet and her throat ragged.

  The dogs left the grotto one by one, licking their jowls and trotting up into the sunlight. She was alone, except for Nandi, who kept watch while she slept. And Ubali, who huddled against the opposite wall, licking his wound clean.

  The sound grated against her nerves. It kept her from sleeping. It kept her from slipping into the still, silent place between one breath and the next.

  With the sound came the memory: Ubali standing beside her father. Snarling. Lunging. And then the guns.

  Ubali had tried to save her father. She should be helping him. Her mother would have known what to do. Sarel traced the pale scar that sliced across the inside of her wrist. It had happened in the city, the last time they had gone.

  Her family had piled into the car and driven the potholed highway. They were going to visit friends who had a little boy about Sarel’s age. When they arrived, the house was dark, the windows boarded up. Hastily packed boxes filled the living room. There was nowhere to sit.

  So they walked to a park nearby, where rusted play structures sprang up out of the weeds and a wrought-iron fence enclosed a sunken pool that had been without water so long a massive crack had split the concrete bowl in half.

  While the children played, the adults huddle
d behind the tire swing, talking in hasty whispers about poisoned groundwater and brackish coastal rivers.

  Sarel and the little blond-haired boy slid down the slide over and over again, chased each other around the little park, and climbed onto rubber swings, kicking their legs into the sky and shrieking with laughter.

  But then Sarel tripped and fell, the tender skin at her wrist snagging on a scrap of rusted metal.

  “She needs a shot and antibiotics,” the woman said, her voice climbing high with panic while she clutched her little boy close. “And where do you think she’ll get something like that now?”

  Sarel’s mother mopped up the blood and wrapped a bandage around the cut.

  “You see!” the man hissed. “It’s not safe here. Not anymore. You should leave too. While you still can.”

  Sarel’s father drove home, his lips drawn in a tight line while he eased the car over bumps and around gaping holes in the highway. But the ride home was Sarel’s favorite part of the whole day. Her mother rode in the back seat with her, cradling her in both arms and singing softly over her head.

  Sarel never saw the little boy or his parents again. And they never went back to the city.

  When the car turned onto the homestead, relief hung in the air like clouds ripe with rain. They were home. They were safe. Sarel’s mother clipped bright green spears from the garden, slit them in half, and pressed the gooey underside against the cut, clicking her tongue and smoothing Sarel’s sun-bleached hair away from the slicks of tears on her cheeks.

  Her mother had always used aloe to soothe a burn or to heal a cut. She had grown the succulents in her garden all year round. When the gourds and climbing beans and sour figs had all bloomed and died back, the aloe stayed. And year after year, as the drought thinned the other plants and cut the crop in half, and then in half again, the aloe remained.

  Sarel pushed herself up off the stones. Maybe the aloe had survived the fire. She could get some for Ubali, make him better. Make him stop licking.

  Sarel scuffed up the stairs and through the burnt yard, shading her eyes. The air was thick with smoke, and a layer of ash smothered the ground. It hurt to move. It hurt to breathe.

  North and east of the homestead, the earth was burned black, straight to the horizon, where a hazy smudge marked the city skyline. To the west stretched bare desert, blurred by undulating waves of hot air. A dry riverbed cut a trench in the dirt to the south, ending abruptly at the base of a low rise encircled by layers of chalky minerals that had leached out of the rocks beneath. The hill was crowned by a copse of sweet thorn trees—the only green things for miles.

  Where the house had been, a few black lumps rose out of the char: a cooking stove, the backless frame of a metal chair, a pile of jumbled mattress coils, and a crumbling stack of chimney bricks. At the base of the stove was a lidded jar: a familiar, stout shape. Flour. Sarel’s stomach roared.

  She waded through the char and hefted the crockery onto her hip. Kneeling in the dirt, she pried open the lid. Like everything else, it was black inside. Sarel closed her lips over a lump of singed flour and ground it between her teeth, tilting her head back to force the paste down her throat. Her eyes watered, and she had to clamp her hand against her mouth to keep from spitting it out again.

  The pups padded up to her and whuffled in her face, licking traces of flour from her fingers and thrusting their noses into the jar. The garden. There might be something to eat in the garden. Sarel wavered to her feet and kept walking.

  Behind the blackened foundation, a knock-kneed windmill listed in the breeze. The dry well beside it was filled with dust. Beyond the new graves, in the middle of the yard, the kennel stood upright, glinting dully in the sun.

  The roof had burned and fallen through the gaps in the chainlink. The dogs panted without any shade, their ribs pumping like bellows. Their tin watering trough was coated with a layer of ash.

  The garden lay to the south of the kennel. Sarel’s footsteps stuttered as the black ribs of tilled earth came into view. Ruined. Like everything else. The ache in her chest began to burn hot and hard. Tears seeped out of her eyes, cutting trails through the soot that caked her cheeks.

  Nandi pressed against her and rubbed the underside of her jaw against the girl’s hip. Sarel dropped her hand to worry the soft edges of Nandi’s ear between her fingers.

  “Nandi.” Sarel’s voice cracked and she slumped to the ground, holding the dog’s face between her palms. Her mouth worked, her breath coming hard and ragged. “What do we do?”

  The wild aloe grew out on the flats. She wasn’t supposed to go beyond the post-and-rail fence that wound around the homestead without one of her parents by her side. She was too young to be out there alone. But all that was left of the fence was a circle of singed holes in the ground.

  This place was her home. And they were her dogs now.

  She would have to do this, all of it, alone.

  9

  Musa

  Musa ran through the coal-black night. He tripped over loose stones and discarded scrap metal that littered the clogged city streets, ducking in and out of shadows. He fell again and again, until the skin on his knees and palms was ragged and bloody. He ran for hours over pavement that was buckled and potholed from years of neglect.

  Musa’s breath scraped through his parched throat—so loud he was sure the sound would give him away and lead the men with their guns right to him. Through any door, behind every tattered window shade, someone could be watching, ready to turn him in. They would hand him over for a single bottle of water.

  So Musa ran and didn’t look back. The air rattled through his lungs, and his every pulse stabbed at the sores on his ankles and wrists.

  When the sky over his shoulder began to pale, the ruined pavement and the press of ramshackle buildings gave way to packed-dirt roads and a few scattered shacks. Musa kept running until he crested a low rise, his feet stuttering at the sudden absence of anything man-made. He stopped, swaying on his feet, and turned to look back the way he had come.

  The city filled his vision, the smoggy sunrise bleeding through the gaps between buildings. He squinted, looking for a plume of dust, listening for the sound of an engine revving. But the air was still, and the city, for now, was quiet.

  Maybe no one was chasing him. Maybe Sivo had died back there.

  Musa turned to face the dusty wasteland that stretched to the horizon: brown dirt, brown grasses, and a few rocky brown hills. Even the trees were brown: leafless skeletons jutting out of the cracked earth.

  His body begged for rest, but he couldn’t stop. Not yet. Musa limped into the desert.

  When the afternoon sun was at its hottest, when he was moments away from collapse, Musa’s footsteps led him to the half-buried roots of a baobab tree. He looked up through a tangle of branches casting a web of shade over him.

  A thread of song scraped past his throat, lifting into the air and smoothing the pain from his face. Scraps of a lullaby—Dingane’s favorite.

  I’ll find it for you, Umama, Dingane had said each time their mother finished the song. I’ll find the secret of the baobab tree.

  But it was the younger brother who had heard the water stored in caverns inside the massive trunk.

  Was that why, Dingane?

  Musa laid a hand against the bark.

  He could hear it now, a tinny hum tickling the base of his skull. Musa plucked a long, hollow blade of brown grass and worked it into a crease in the bark. He sucked until his cheeks ached, sucked until he thought he would faint. Until water began to trickle onto his tongue.

  He drank, his legs wobbling beneath him.

  Musa left the straw in place and slung a leg over a low-lying branch. He climbed into the canopy, settled into a wide notch, and sank into sleep.

  10

  Sarel

  The aloe grew in the west. Sarel remembered that much from before.

  She walked away from the homestead alone. The sky before her was smeared with the grays and but
ter yellows of dawn. The wind plucked at her tattered cotton shirt and teased the frayed ends of her shorts. Her hands were jammed into fists, her bottom lip caught between her front teeth.

  Before she had taken a dozen strides, Nandi loped up to her, tail swinging, nose lifted to catch the scent of the place they were headed. The pups hurried to follow. And then the whole pack was with Sarel, trotting up or falling back, but always surrounding her.

  Just like before.

  It had been their habit every day, Sarel and her mother, to set out into the desert with a small jug of water, a rifle, and at least five full-grown dogs. Sarel would carry a satchel over her shoulder, the wind lifting it away from her back and cooling the sweaty skin beneath. Coming home, it would bang against the backs of her knees with each step, full of the tough-skinned fruit or tubers they’d gathered.

  Every bush and blooming grass was a lesson. Sarel’s mother taught her which cacti held water, which grasses made for the tightest weave, what trees had long taproots reaching deep down to hidden pools of water. She learned the secrets of soil and rocks. How limestone, dolomite, and sandstone pulled rainwater down, tunneled it through tiny pores and stored it underground, away from the greedy sun.

  Sarel and her mother had always walked away from the city, away from trails others might be wandering. And they never went far. They were out and back every day before the sun was even a quarter of the way across the sky. Her father met them at the gate each time, with a fresh cup of water and a kiss for them both.

  They shared the water, drinking it slowly, one sip at a time. In this desert, in this drought, it was good to be careful. No one knew how long the water would last.

  Sometimes they found wild onions for dinner; sometimes they brought home a handful of seeds or a shoot wrapped in a damp towel. Always they waited until the sun dragged its heat below the horizon to tuck their treasures into the garden soil and dribble a teaspoon of dishwater over each one.