Dust to Mud

Ita licked her lips, trying to bring back a little moisture into the cracked pinks. They were particularly painful today, as she’d pulled off a loose chunk of the top one with her teeth the night before. 

“Do you have any water?” She looked up at Calder, her hand outstretched. They were on their way to their afternoon classes. Each day as the sun curled toward its westward bed, the school opened up again. 

“You know I’ve got none to share.” During the day, when the heat was brutal, they were to stay in the shade and avoid any tasks that might make them thirst for the water no one had enough of. 

“No harm in asking, though, now is there?” 

“Except for the bit of spit you wasted in the words.” 

“Aye, then it seems we’re both even, now doesn’t it?” 

The dust by their feet kicked up and covered both of them from shins to ground, some of it puffing up to coat their bodies in small, tan dots. 

For the remainder of the walk, Ita watched her feet as they dragged patterns in the dusted road and kept her mouth shut. When she stared toward the ground, the little bit of saliva in her mouth pooled just behind her bottom teeth; she liked to dip the tip of her tongue in it, creating a small bubble and letting it pop. 

It was during these minutes, the ones where her mind was focused on the clouds at her feet and the bubble on her taste buds, that the first drop from above landed on her bare neck. 

The cool splash spread down her back, pooling at the dimple just above the line of her pants. 

“What…?” She began, her head tilting backwards and facing the darkening sky. Another drop hit her brow, then another against her cheek. 

Calder was stopped a few feet in front of her, his head raised in the same astonishment. The date was all wrong. The rain was not expected for another two months. She had it marked on her calendar each year, counting down the days to when she would be able to refill their water containment silo for the next half year. 

To be fair, the rains sometimes moved to and fro by a few hours, sometimes even a day, but these many handoffs between the moon and the sun… she had never heard of this. 

 For another moment, she simply stood there, her jaw cranked open and eyes squeezed shut, relishing the quenching drops as they burst within her mouth. 

The next, she felt a creeping fear begin to take over her body. She had done nothing to prepare the silo, no cleaning or setup or extra buckets to catch what they could in the minimal hours of rain. 

Her soles, so recently stuck to the ground, remembered their purchase and began carrying Ita back home. The ground, so recently dust, was quickly turning into mud as the soft, delicate drops transformed into a wall of rain. 

Toes dug into the mud, legs stretched in strides, and she tugged herself as swiftly as she could towards the small, one-level brick house they called home. 

She knew the rainstorms didn’t last long in the current world. What they once had called deserts covered the entirety of the globe these days, dried clumps of dirt and sands crowding out where once-grass had grown lushly. The rains came twice a year, once in the autumn months and once in the spring, though the weather that used to differentiate between those times had long since fled. 

Although Ita didn’t understand the science or explanation behind it, she knew her days could be counted reliably between the openings of the sky. Every year since she’d become a woman, she’d known which days their thirst would be quenched. 

Every year until now. 

Because the rain was coming and it seemed to have no desire to stop. 

The gentle slope from the top of the hill to her home was slick, the bottoms of her feet refusing to catch traction. 

As she attempted to slow, to find her footing before she tumbled as Jack or Jill, she realized that Calder had not been left behind after all. His body careened into her own, sending them both spilling down the incline as an amorphous blob. Limbs jutted out at angles; cries curled from mouths. 

The halting of their bodies was not sudden, but rather like a trudge. Those jutting, angled limbs caught in the damp earth, slowing them gradually - anticlimactically.

Ita wiped at her eyes, trying to dislodge the clumps of mud that clung to her cheeks and brow. Cautiously, she pried her eyelids open. Squinting, she peered up through the slashing rain at the silo that stood next to her simple home.

The top hatch was still solidly latched closed. 

The buckets were in a half-used disarray beneath the awning. 

And as Ita scrambled to unhook her own body from Calder’s, hoping to get the buckets pulled and the silo’s wide mouth opened, the angled, slicing rain slowed. 

“Wait,” she mumbled, the plea sent to the rain gods somewhere beyond the clouds. 

Finally, she managed to disengage her leg from his, her knees pressing into the soft mud beneath her. Thrashing her toes against the ground, she threw herself upward, to standing, and rushed for the resting buckets. 

“I can still…” The thought trailed away as she pulled an entire pile of the containers into the open air. 

But the sky only spat now, barely a mist in the thick air. 

“No.” She said, tugging a few more buckets out. “Please.” She didn’t know who she was speaking to, from whom she was asking for a dash of generosity, but someone had to be listening. Something. 

The last few drops fell, an afterthought. 

Ita licked her lips, tasting the moisture on her pinks. And then she allowed herself the luxury of a few of her own drops.