Parched

The crack started at the heel. A tiny, silvered fissure, like a dry riverbed seen from a plane. I ignored it. You ignore the small warnings when you’re busy living.

And inside me, a strange desert was blooming. My tongue felt like a piece of suede. My lips were two slices of old parchment. But deeper than that, in the hollow behind my breastbone, there was a thirst that water couldn’t touch. A parchedness of the self. I had used up all my cool, green words. My laughter had turned to dust. Every memory felt like a photograph left too long in the sun—faded at the edges, curling inward. Parched

I remember the precise moment thirst stopped being a sensation and became a presence. The crack started at the heel

That’s when I understood. The drought wasn’t outside. The drought was the house, the town, the season. But the parched —the real, bone-deep parched—was me. It was the sound of a future that had forgotten how to rain. You ignore the small warnings when you’re busy living

But the crack had friends. By August, my feet were a cartographer’s nightmare—a delta of broken skin, each line a tributary feeding into the great, dry mouth of thirst. I drank. God, how I drank. Glasses of tepid water by the bed. Bottles gulped in the car, the plastic crumpling like a second lung. Pitchers of lemonade so tart they made my jaw ache. It all went down, cool and brief, and rose up again as vapor the moment I stepped outside.

It was three in the afternoon. The air was a solid thing, a weight leaning against the glass of the kitchen window. I had my palm flat on the counter, and I watched the ghost of my own hand lift off—the heat rising in shimmering waves. The dog lay on the tile floor, his ribs rising and falling in a slow, dreamless sleep. Even the flies had given up. They clung to the ceiling, drunk on their own desiccation.

I just listened.