Bittersweet Are The Waters / Mame Bougouma Diene

“Gimme eight liters of shit-water and ten packets of flavoring.” Miyongi told the bartender.

“That’s not enough to cover the taste Miyongi, but I’m starting to think that’s just how you like it.”

“Fuck off, James.”

“Just saying, it’s your kidneys…” He lifted two four-liter plastic bottles on the counter “There you go. Transfer those credits and you’re good.”

Miyongi typed the Salamander bar’s credit line into his wristband, trading a liter of fresh water for eight liters of water recycled from feces. It was the cheapest way to stretch water credits, and he needed a lot of water.

“Let me get a glass of fresh too. You owe me at least one by now.”

James looked at him and nodded. “Yeah. I reckon that much.”

He filled a glass and handed it to Miyongi who shot it down in one gulp. James shook his head. Most people sipped on a glass of fresh water for hours, piss-water even, but Miyongi guzzled it like moonshine then reveled in shit for weeks.

Miyongi caught his look, thinking little do you know, grabbed the jugs, adjusted his facemask, and stepped out into the evening sun.

#

The Drought was punishment from the Nymphs.

Hiding in the clouds, they’d sealed their hearts with ice, and hadn’t shed a tear for centuries. When the world was young and the oceans and riverbeds lay empty, the Nymphs cried when a child died of thirst. One day a nymph dropped from heaven and fell prey to cruel men who killed children for her tears and starved people for water, until her friends had enough, and cried their companion’s misery and flooded the world.

But they had changed their minds again, watching the forests shrink and disappear, the oceans of the world shrivel to giant lakes, and the children they once mourned growing worse than their forebears. They shook their heads in the skies, refusing to shed a single tear for those people they had tried to love, and who’d broken their hearts yet again. 

#

Miyongi didn’t know what to call the red fruit growing on the bush. He didn’t know if they were fruit or poison yet. His grandmother had warned him about that, a few days before H2OCorp took her, when she’d handed him the old seeds and hit him upside the head so he remembered.

Everybody thought he was crazy, locked up in his apartment with some strange fetish or another, but they didn’t know plants, they’d never even seen grass. Shit-water, piss-water, sweat-water, it was all the same to plants. A drop was a river, and the things that would sprout with a cup…

Things that would get him arrested for wasting water on non-humans for starts. It would cost him his entry-level job with H2OCorp, and probably his life. There’s a lot of water in a human body, it would make up for what he’d squandered on plants.

He cracked the window to his cubicle and let some air into the damp room.

On the 175th floor there wasn’t as much dust as nearer the ground, and outside, Amanzi spread its myriad towers for thousands of miles along the old ocean floors. From the Arctic plateau to the Atlantic Lake buried at its heart, where executives had their apartments, overlooking the sea-sized pond, where the breeze still hinted of iodine, the small waves of mermaids, and children knew the feel of water on their toes, enough of it to drown in.

Time flows the weight of water, Miyongi thought. Now, if only we’d thought of solar panel cities before drying up the oceans….

He dumped a jug of shit-water into a large cylinder. The cloudy liquid dispersed through transparent tubes dripping over little pots and glass tanks lining the walls, and fledgling growths in early stages of germination hanging from the ceiling. Then into thicker tubes connected to baby tree stumps with ferns growing between, a lush dark green and a smell that had no name, because none of these things had any, it was just life, the sappy smell of life.

He poured the second jug into a blender and emptied the packets of artificial flavoring, watched the liquid spin purple, filtered it through a cold box into a small glass, and took a sip. James was right, it still tasted like shit.

#

Naisha stepped out of her building just as the sun sunk into the ground. In contemplation for hours, her sensitive eyes broke down every undulating ray, tentacles sliming along buildings into an orange river.

She blinked, unwrapped her blue mouthpiece and inhaled, letting the wavelets of gritty air sprinkle her tongue, rolling the dust against her palate, crushing it with her teeth. She pulled a small vial from a chain between her breasts and cracked it open, two tiny droplets of fresh water sliding down her tongue to mix with the earth and bloom within her.

The oceans within us. Worlds within worlds. She thought, tying back her mouthpiece and adjusting her goggles.

The street was an empty moat between the towers casting shadows of themselves in the glisten of a million eyes like milky cataracts. Like the ones growing slowly behind her eyes.

She ignored the thought. In the afterglow of meditation she let her feet carry her before she thought. She would see a sign and she would know. There had been a red flash, merriness and the shadow of death.

Dust rose behind her as she walked down the street, with a soft rumble turned rampage as a group of death runners squirmed past her in desiccated exhaustion, one dropping dead. Emaciated legs folding beneath her like a mantis, shredded lungs exploded in her chest pearling blood on her lips, raising small puffs of dust into already dusty air as her head hit the ground. 

The others kept running, already blocks away when Naisha looked up from the corpse.  

“It’s mine!” a voice rang from a low-level window.

“Liar! He’s a fucking liar! It’s mine!” Another answered across the street.

There isn’t enough water in that woman to fill a cup, she thought, as one of the runners broke away from the group and walked under the purple neon of the Salamander Bar, nearly collapsing as he pushed the doors open, and yelled.

“I’m going down drowning! Who’s with me?!”

The crowd inside went nuts.

“Merriness…” Naisha said with a smile and followed him in.

 

“His time is nigh! Behold the great flood!”

“Behold the great flood!”

The cult of Nymphomaniacs had been the fastest growing religion for a hundred years. The torch-lit parade towards the local temple called for their messiah to bring forth the flood, and the shorter your water credits the more likely you were to be a Nymphomaniac and worship the tears of the Nymphs and the water of women. At their weekly gatherings, the Priestess would sit naked on a chair, her legs spread for the congregation to come lick the water from her fountain and quench their thirst in anticipation of the day they’d drown.

The procession drew passers-by in its wake, flowing through avenues and inundating dozens of blocks, the dusty night air awash with thousands of burning eyes and discordant voices.

Miyongi walked into pandemonium at the Salamander Bar.

“Drink! Drink! Drink! Drink!”

The patrons cheered a man sitting at the bar, drinking from a funnel James held over his mouth. He chugged for a few seconds and raised a hand to catch his breath.

The crowd roared. The man stood on his chair and yelled back at them.

Suicide by water. Nothing new. They would run miles in the dusty heat without drinking, putting stress on their kidneys, then stop at a bar and spend all their credits drinking themselves to death. Their kidneys retained more liquid than they could process, logging the blood with water and gorging their brain cells until they burst.

“How long’s it been going on?” Miyongi asked a guy standing by the door, sipping on a green ice cone.

“Barely started. Fifteen minutes maybe. Good rhythm this guy, but he’s bound to slow down. Got my money on two hours. What do you think?”

“I think he’s holding up my beer.”

“Beer huh? What you celebrating?”

Miyongi shrugged and walked away. The man was back on his chair, eyes red with fatigue, but determined on going down drowning. The bar got to keep the body and its water, and it was a good show until the seizures started.

“What’s it gonna be my man?” James asked cheerfully “Moving up to sweat-water? Just kidding. Lucky day, everybody gets a free cup on the house. Don’t say I’ve never done anything for you.”

“Make it a beer for me J.”

James whistled. “I’ll be drowned. You’re not getting that on the house. Grab a seat.”

Miyongi watched the guy shooting cups down. A reddish-brown haired woman sat at the bar between him and imminent cerebral edema, and waved towards James.

She sat staring at the ongoing suicide while Miyongi stared at her, and James brought his drink.

“Here’s your beer sir.” James said, then turned to the woman as she turned towards Miyongi, “What’s it gonna be for you, girl? You get a cup on the house on account of that guy over there.”

“I’ll take that.” She answered, smiling at Miyongi. “Beer huh? What you celebrating?”

The beer was mostly residue from battery acid-based moonshine with a little carbonation and flavoring; it cost two liters of fresh water a glass, but he was celebrating. Nine months of crossbreeding seeds, drinking piss-water on a good day, and enhancing them with chemicals had paid off. He’d be ready to start sowing the neighborhood in a week.

He stared into her dry green eyes, her freckled yellow brown skin stretched aridly over high cheekbones and a Nubian nose, and reached into his pocket.

“I was walking south this evening….”

“Here’s your cup. Sip it slowly.” James interrupted, putting her drink down.

“…and something caught my eye on the wind.”

He pulled out a red flower petal before her incredulous eyes, dipped it into her glass and placed it on her cheek where it stuck softly.

“Lucky huh?”

A red flash, merriness and the shadow of death.

She caught her breath, placed her hand over his, and asked: “I live upstairs. Wanna head up?”

#

Her lanky, amber figure stepped out of the air shower, slid under the sheets, and she looked up at the small petal. Naisha was her name, and she had framed it over her bed between two small slabs of glass, the early sunrays breaking through her window lighting it in shades of claret. 

“It’s amazing that it came this far…” She said.

Miyongi shrugged. “It’s amazing to us. Doesn’t have to be.” He answered, reaching for the remote and turning on the television to an ad for water insurance, shot along the beaches of the Atlantic Lake.

Running out of water credits? Spending too much on a large family? Aquainsurance is your friend in need…

“Ever been there?” she asked absently, staring at the small waves breaking on the beach.

…Water is a resource not a right. We can insure you a steady supply against a few years of your life…

“Yeah.” Miyongi said, “Atlantic Branch employees of H2OCorp get to go for a day.”

…You don’t want to be a water burden yourself in your old days do you? Aquainsurance: Live less, Live better.

Aquainsurance’s supply came from the water of bodies they received in exchange for a few years of fresh water. Ten years of water insurance for five years of your life, twenty years for ten. All precisely estimated. He turned off the TV.

“How was it?” she asked, “I wanted to go, but it’s all my credits just the one way, and then what? Aquainsurance? Please.”

Miyongi chuckled.

“It’s huge,” he said “But when I see that much water I stop being thirsty. It’s completely lost on me….”

She punched him in the ribs.

“Seriously, it’s bullshit Naisha. We need to know what we work for, and remember why we ration, remove and dehydrate people, but that’s it, the day trip and it’s over, meanwhile someone else is rationing your credits, and they get to walk on the beach and watch the sunset, and swim while we air shower. It’s bullshit. We die, they don’t, they’ll cut us off one day, and it might just be a good thing, we’re going nowhere in a hurry.”

“You sound like a fanatic.”

“I’m not a fanatic. Why? You don’t believe that doomsday flood crap do you?”

“You gotta believe in something.”

He got out of bed, buttoned his shirt and pants, leaned over, and kissed her.

“Then believe in me. I am the flood, you’ll see… See you at the bar.”

 

Naisha stretched under her sheets. The slither of light reflecting against the glass panel around the petal slid along the wall, the dry leaf retaining a glimmer like a pearling drop of blood about to burst. She had never thought of blood as something that could be beautiful, sharing the ephemeral tension of a flower, the intimacy of a breath.

She walked up to the panel and smashed it on the floor.

The last thing the world needed was another poet. But there she was, another troubadour facing the waterfall at the edge of the earth. She could have thrown up. But more importantly the petal was a distraction, a symbol, and you could get lost in symbols.

There were traces of Miyongi on the bed. Her heightened senses reminded her of her fading sight, and the musty smell of the man did not help her in the slightest.

She picked up her radio transmitter. The voice on the other end of the line abrupt and annoyed.

“This had better be important.”

Naisha breathed in. It was.

He wasn’t great as a lover, and nowhere near as tough as the aura that floated around him, but the signs had come to her and manifested. He had named himself the flood. As cynical as anything about him, but in a thousand years no one had. No one. Not in a thousand years.

Maybe it had been but post-coital bravado. Maybe he had been groomed right. Or maybe it was the last and final sign.

She looked out the window, the orange dusty air streaming like oil against the blue sky in swarms of famished locusts.

If I’m wrong….

“It is, High Priestess. We….” This was on her. “It’s exactly as planned. The Nymphs will cry for us again.”

#

A group of children ran past the stone stairs leading into the temple while Miyongi walked down to the street, wiping some of the High Priestess’s water from his lips, the flying nymph carved into the building behind him, her hands open invitingly, a single tear running down her cheek.

Miyongi remembered being one of those kids. Climbing the maintenance ladders up to the train tracks, licking the condensation from the freight trains hauling tanks of water, frozen in their tracks. It was common for bootleggers to hijack trains, jamming the tracks to siphon off tons of the desperate’s water. H2OCorp… How did we ever get to this?

They got to lick condensation off a rusty train. A bounty for a thirsty child. Miyongi’s tongue tingled with acrid memory.

His grandmother wasn’t always easy. She was never easy. She was an absolute mess. A near constant psychobabbleabout salty earth and sacrifice. But she believed in those tiny dry seeds, and he hadn’t betrayed that. He hadn’t betrayed his word to her.

She’d never told him how many years she’d pawned off in aquainsurance to keep him alive. Perhaps that was why she was always so intense. Time was running out and she needed him to understand. Maybe some kid had licked off some of her condensation one day. Maybe she lived forever that way.

Of all his friends he was the only one who’d noticed. Despite the rust, the dry air around them, tiny, tiny things grewon the tanks. If anything could live on that, even ever so briefly…. His grandmother wasn’t crazy, and those seeds….

He hadn’t betrayed his word to her. Even as he applied for H2OCorp’s Science Program. Even as he shook sweaty palms with self-sufficient predators and kissed ass. He would show those greedy weeds in their seaside towers what was what.

What was it the High Priestess said? The nymph that cried was the child who’d died? He didn’t believe, but he needed all the luck he could get. 

It was sowing time.

 

Miyongi looked around cautiously, planted a seed deep inside a crack in the concrete, and sprinkled a few drops discreetly from a canister under his shirt. The block was still empty, but the lights from windows along the towers made the dust flicker with orange waves.

The sun would rise, and the supercharged seeds would start digging roots—very long roots—eventually tapping into the Atlantic Lake and slowly turning the neighborhood green. There were plants that could withstand the drought; it would only take a few weeks.

Miyongi walked towards his building while the sun bled across the city grid, drowning neighborhoods in stifling heat. It made its way behind him, leaking through a tiny crack in the concrete where it landed on a small seed.

The rumble of a boiling kettle rose beneath Miyongi’s feet and an explosion of earth and rock projected him further into the street, gritty dirt filling his mouth. He tasted blood on his tongue and rolled over on himself. The air was too thick with dust to see more than a few feet ahead, but the sound of massive jaws crunching metal to shattering glass and screams cut through the haze.

The ground shook from another direction, followed by more explosions in the surrounding city blocks, and through the swirling dust Miyongi looked up at what remained of the building behind him, and the five-hundred-foot cactus clamped to its side and growing.

#

The tide of tremors ebbed slowly. Miyongi’s ears rang with the repeated explosions, but a voice made its way through shock.

“I saw him! It’s him!”

A human roar whipped Miyongi to his feet in self-preservation, and he darted before the mob coalesced.

“He’s getting away!”

He limped through the growing heat, turned a corner opposite from the bubbling crowd and almost impaled himself on a ten-foot thorn.

There were cacti everywhere in different stages of growth; barrel cactus like giant, prickly, green pumpkins; and more yet shooting towards the sky in spirals.

He doubled back down a side alley onto another intersection blocked by apple cacti forming hundred-foot hedges, and pear cactus, their racket-shaped leaves climbing skyscrapers, covered in gleaming red fruit.

The whole thing had gone entirely too well.

The mob closed in, blocking the street on either side of him. He fell back, crawling up against a massive green thorn, its shade darkening the crowd to rabidly gleaming eyes.

“Get him!”

Miyongi screamed the only thing sure to stop them in their tracks.

“Water! Free Water!”

They paused.

“Free water!” he pushed himself up and pulled out his knife, the crowd surged. “Wait! The plants! They’re bringing water! Free water! Wait!”

He had modified the seeds to increase the water content in the pulp, and hoped the accelerated growth hadn’t ruined the fruit. They should hold water, and he should filter it first, but poisoning should beat getting dismembered. 

He grabbed hold of a pear cactus fruit, carving out the skin between the spines for the juicy flesh. It squished lewdly under his hand. The crowd was silent, intent on the moist sounds coming from the plant.

Miyongi ripped out a chunk and shoved it into his mouth. The juice was thicker than water and bitter, but it trickled down his throat soothingly. He carved in deeper, oblivious to the mob. The crowd rushed forward and started tearing at the fruit around him.

A gaunt, bearded man with sunburnt grey eyes, a nymph carved into his forehead, stared at Miyongi, a piece of fruit in his hand. He looked down at the pulp, pointed a finger at Miyongi and said: “His time has come! Behold the great flood!”

#

Small pellets of plaster drizzled from the ceiling over the followers cowering in the candle-lit hall of the temple as the tremors ebbed smoothly into the ground.

The more pious devoutly drank the water that was life, assuaging all fears; their faces buried in the fountain that is all, tasting of sweet immortality and bitter, salty truth.

“So it has begun.” The high priestess said, approaching Naisha as she tied a black belt around her white robes, hair like lava melting through snow.

“He did say we would see.” She answered walking alongside the High Priestess.

“Indeed. What do you make of him?”

Naisha hesitated, her saliva gluing her tongue to her palate.

“Only time will tell. The Nymphs will cry or he will die, but High Priestess, he should know. He is free to throw his life away in any way he chooses, as we all are, but he was set upon this path. He didn’t chose it on his own.”

The High Priestess snorted. “Miyongi’s grandmother was Supreme High Priestess in my day. Atlantic and Pacific. No one has held the title since. She held the last seeds and lost her mind. I thought we were done but it seems we are not. He didn’t have a choice, she didn’t have a choice and neither do any of us. You didn’t chose to lose your eyes Naisha, yet here you are. Our lives are all drowned in the well of fate. Some sink and some swim.”

She paused.

“The choice is yours, just as it was to join the cult all those years ago. If you feel you must tell him then do so, you know his temperament better than I. Maybe he will make the Nymphs cry anyway. Maybe he won’t and it will all have been for nothing, but what if he turns his back and is lost to us forever? H2OCorp will hear about this, if you are right and he is it, there will be more blood than tears before we are done. Are you ready to fight? To face the consequences?”

“I’m the last person you want in a fight.”

“Why? Your eyes again? We’ve been over this. You were trained. You’ll go blind anyway. Make every bullet count… That was your commander speaking. Talk to your mother now, I’ll listen… it’s… it’s alright.”

There was but the hint of sadness in the High Priestess’s voice, somewhere deep she feared she’d forgotten how to be a mother.

“I’m fine, mother… I’m afraid. Every day my vision falters. A flash and it’s gone and back. I can’t feel the blindness growing behind my eyes, but I wish I did, I would know, I would have something to hold on to, instead it’s just this, life goes on and every day the darkness creeps closer, silently, and I… I….”

A tear ran down her cheek, the High Priestess’s finger wiping it off and pressing it to her lips.

“Don’t waste your waters, daughter,” she said, in a rare moment of empathy. “Don’t let fear consume the light, don’t let the flood within you wither and dry like the rivers of old. Even when that light is gone I will be here. Even when that light is gone you will still be a priestess. There are worlds beyond sight, and they can’t be uglier than this one or I will have wasted my life and should have worked for the corporations… I would have been good too. I would have been really good.”

Naisha barked a small laugh. Her mother was cold. She always had been. Perhaps there had once been a fearful girl there too. Too scared to spread her legs and embrace her power. If there had she was long gone, but something remained. The piece that gave Naisha tough but tender lessons in life. The dry humor this world deserved.

“See?” She said. “That mirth will never leave you, Naisha, but before you give that boy a choice you were never given, ask yourself, when the darkness takes over, when you see the glimmer of the world that will be your last memory in light, what world do you want to see? Now come, the faithful need reassuring.” 

#

Shadows of giants licked the broken buildings, draped in orange flames.

Miyongi looked up to a tower shattered at the waist, fallen into another, bridging the two buildings like an arch. Behind it collapsed structures piled into a wall, sealing off the block from the rest of the city. Everywhere concrete bloomed. Liana lassoing across streets lit in sienna spring by the flames, the giant cactus leaves swaying in waves of matching heartbeats to powerful thumps.

Beneath his feet dried blood turned slowly brown. Under the rubble bodies rotted, slowly gluing the debris together.

The survivors had cleared as many corpses as they could, and now the mountain of stone and bone piled beneath the arch, served as a platform for the Soul Extractors. Up and down the small hill they marched, distorted shadows carrying bodies up, and marching down, a transparent bag of grayish water from their dearest of dears on their backs.

Up and down for eight days now, day in and day out, thousands upon thousands.

Priestesses chanted a deep melancholy over the machines’ rattle and hum. Eight days of fasting. Not a drop drunk. The priestesses’ legs remained sealed, and would do so until every soul was accounted for.

It was odd how people had come together. He always thought there was only selfishness behind the layers of phony, but there wasn’t, there was almost the semblance of a community here.

Miyongi watched silently as they passed. Everyone had lost someone. A loved one, a friend, an enemy. Everyone except him, he stood alone, shoved left and right, every night, and no one would spare him a glance.

He tried to help. The cult monitored everything at H2OCorp. They didn’t know what to make of his little stunt. And what they couldn’t understand could only be a threat. They would launch an armed foray in a few days. A few days to secure the neighborhood, grow hedges, prepare a defense, all the….

He felt a hand shaking his shoulder. He spun and looked down to an old woman, her dried, lightly wrinkled brown skin glowing eternally young under shining white hair, her light grey eyes resting gently on his face. She lifted a vial tied to a string, over his head and around his neck.

“My granddaughter’s waters. Keep them. They are yours. She is yours. She didn’t die for nothing. You understand?”

Miyongi didn’t move, by the time he nodded she had moved on, and he was alone once again.

#

Naisha aimed her machine-gun down towards the southwest corner of the intersection from the fiftieth floor, standing on a pear cactus leaf protruding from a building. 

Armored vehicles streamed up the avenue under a cloud of dust. She flashed Morse code down to the fighters behind the first hedge of apple cacti barring the avenue shut.

The world knew the neighborhood as Garden now, and it was impregnable.

#

“We got twenty tanks closing in at a half-mile!” A teenage boy yelled at a group of people lined behind the hedge.

After six months holding Garden against repeated assaults by corporate forces, they knew their job. Dozens of hands pelted seeds over the hedge and ran in the opposite direction for cover. And then it rained.

Hoses poured water from windows high above the street over the freshly landed seeds, just as the tanks rolled over them.

#

The ground trembled. Naisha watched the seeds germinate, tearing through steel hulls and bone in a geyser of bleeding metal.

The Nymphomaniacs wanted her close to Miyongi, there was a true spark in him, a rough sense of purpose that needed guidance lest it overflowed and swept them all away, but she couldn’t deny the thrill of fighting for her own, and her people.

Many young girls looked into the clouds and dreamed of becoming Nymphs themselves, only a few had it in them to become priestesses. As had Miyongi’s grandmother.

In those tiny moments, she felt alive again. Her sight clearer than it would ever be again, and she forgot about Miyongi, her mother, the cult. About whether he should be told why he had been given the seeds, why so much lay on his scrawny shoulders. That he was alive to die. None of it mattered. She was one with the tide, one with the hail, one with the storm.

A stampede rang from the surrounding blocks as hundreds of ground troops attempted an invasion. She narrowed her sights on them, and started mowing.

#

Miyongi heard the machine guns rattle, and stormed towards the temple. 

The cult had unleashed a torrent of apocalyptic fervor through the old ocean bottoms, and stockpiled enough artillery to give them an edge, but they wouldn’t last. Radios relayed messages of Nymphomaniac uprisings as far as the Pacific Lake; the Atlantic urban sprawl was a riotous wreck, and the Nymphs had yet to shed a single tear. 

Soft moaning seeped from where priestesses administered the faithful; children hopped from thick leaves to their windows and back; laundry left to dry from vines over the streets leaked to the ground into furrows irrigating small gardens. 

The cacti drew water steadily through their roots. The ground wasn’t damp yet, but it would be. He grew fruits and vegetables; there were flowers, and people tasted something other than recombinant protein bars and powdered carbohydrates.  

The High Priestesses knew he was no messiah. They had their own agenda, but what was his? He hadn’t thought beyond a practical joke. He was a rebel, not a revolutionary. He’d wanted to inspire, a droplet of ether to sprinkle their dreams with.

He wasn’t bringing a flood; he was draining one hole into another. The Atlantic Lake was migrating north, and outside the hedge walls of Garden thousands were dying, cramming at the edges, hoping the walls would crack like a ruptured dam and getting hailed with bullets for their faith.

Miyongi knew what happened to false prophets, and saw it in too many eyes, staring into the dry, cirrus speckled skies and draining at his soul.

Tens of thousands had died when his fairy-tale cacti sprouted. He’d quelled their anger by quenching their thirst, but there’s no such thing as eternal gratitude.

   When the ammunition ran out, before the buildings sunk in quicksand, before the tanks poured in, they would turn on him.

#

A dozen priestesses had gathered to consider strategies. Nymphomaniacs in Pacific City had secured the administration’s weapon caches, but were reluctant to charge.

“We need to take the fight beyond the hedges!” Miyongi said, addressing the High Priestess. “What’re you waiting for? You know how many people are trying to get in. I’m a dead man anyway, people who could barely afford a drink every other day want me dead. How many followers are you willing to sacrifice? How many priestesses?”

“Every woman’s a priestess, Miyongi.” She responded softly, “There are billions of priestesses. The water of women are the bitter tears of the Nymphs. One and same. Both true. Do you remember what I told you?”

“Yes.” He said cautiously, “The Nymphs that cry are the dying children.”

She nodded. “Precisely, but not just the children Miyongi. The Nymphs need inspiration, their faith in us restored. There have been few great souls since the Drought, you might be one of them.”

He pinched his nose bone. “What on god’s brown earth…”

“You’re not the Messiah,” she interrupted, “We’ve always known that. There is no such thing as a messiah, Miyongi, only the rare alignment of circumstance and an individual. For what it’s worth, you are that person now.”

Nymphomaniacs were insane, but it was contagious.

“So we agree?” He asked, “We’re taking the fight to the company. Yes?”

The priestesses looked him in the eye and nodded.

“Great!” Miyongi started. “We have enough tanks to….”

“You must go alone.” The High Priestess interjected. “Guns don’t inspire. Heart does. Pour your heart’s waters for us, and we’ll fight for you.”

He shook his head. “You want me dead too, huh? Amazing how it works….”

The High Priestess’s blue-brown eyes glistened. She shook her head, walked up to him, and rested her hand on his cheek.

“You can lead the charge and you’ll die anyway, if that’s what you wish. But we can’t protect you much longer. We don’t want you dead Miyongi. We want you to shine, then to die, and then… we want you to cry.”

#

Miyongi walked onto the roof and shut the door behind himself. The night was moonless, but far away the city bathed in reddish flames. He couldn’t hear the screams, there’d be enough of those come morning. H2OCorp was ready to throw everything at them. The whole world would burn.

Naisha would be waiting at the bar, but he wasn’t quite ready yet.

He juggled a few seeds. Tiny things, as big to him as he was to the continental plateaus, but when they burst the ground trembled. If the Nymphs hadn’t cried for every dehydrated corpse in a thousand years they wouldn’t cry for him; but he had one surprise left. A big one. They wouldn’t cry, but they will laugh.

 

“Ha!” James exclaimed, a disheveled Miyongi walking into the Salamander Bar. “The asshole who killed my business. Come here and let me throw some water in your stupid face.”

“Your business was never that good anyway.” he said, pulling a chair at the bar next to Naisha.

“Everything alright?” she asked, concern written over the scars she had earned leading squadrons of Nymphomaniacs.

How could he have made up his mind before looking at her?

“I guess….” He said, as James handed him a glass of real beer. Real alcohol tasted oddly light, but it was smooth and refreshing.

“What did the High Priestesses want with you?” Naisha insisted.

“They don’t want anything with me. They want me gone.”

“Yeah, well so does half of Garden.” James said. “You killed a lot of people, brother. I mean, you did help us out a bunch, but….”

“Shut up, James.” Naisha snapped. “What do you mean, gone?”

He drew a deep gulp. “I’m not quite sure, a bunch of mystical nonsense but… well, either I let Garden tear me apart, or I go out with a blast.”

Naisha grabbed his hand, confession on her lips but said instead: “You can save this place Miyongi.”

“I don’t know anymore, not a tear has fallen. We’re barely holding on. I was stupid and callous. H2OCorp won’t relent. The Pacific City Nymphomaniacs won’t budge unless they see a sign. I’m a dead man walking and...”

“You’re gonna fold to those nutters?” James asked. “They’ve got their finger on the pulse alright, but you can’t kill yourself Miyongi.”

“That’s the funny part, they make death sound like immortality.” Miyongi answered.

“They’re just using you. You’re less valuable to them alive, is all.”

“I’m not valuable to anybody alive. Not anymore, maybe I should have kept the seeds to myself and let this damned place dry up and shrivel, but I had a promise to keep.” He finished his drink. “And I kept it. Better people than me have died for this.” He touched the vial of the little girl’s water tucked under his shirt. “Too many people, and they never had a say. They’re right. If I’m gonna fight, I’ll fight till the end.”

“You’re crazier than the Nymphomaniacs…” James said.

“Or perhaps he’s just a better man than you,” Naisha said.

“Perhaps, but I’ll be alive to tell otherwise,” James said, turning his eyes away and moving to sweep the bar.

Naisha kissed Miyongi on the cheek, her eyes locked on his with an intensity he hadn’t seen in the most fervent of priestesses.

“You’ll bring the flood, love. You will.” She said. “Come on, let’s get out of here, if it’s gonna be your last night then let it be mine.”

“Let it be ours.” Miyongi replied, to flashes of his grandmother being dragged away by uniformed thugs. He took her hand and followed her.

 

Miyongi held Naisha’s hand as they peered through a crack in the hedges at the lines of tanks and rocket launchers on the other side. The sky yawning its darker thoughts away into a new day. More armored vehicles were lined up behind the two of them, carved with the nymph, and throughout the hundreds of blocks of Garden fanatics stood ready to rage.

“So,” Naisha teased Miyongi, “Still don’t believe, do you?”

“Nope, but I won’t die a coward.”

His grandmother had died believing in him, protecting old seeds that might have been dead themselves. It’s what he would do.

He grabbed her by the shoulders, and added: “Run, run as far back as you can and don’t stop, no matter what you hear. As long as you’re alive, run.”

Naisha’s vision faltered. His face and the world blurred and exploded in vapor and resettled all at once. Something had floated in the vapor. Or had it? Was any of this real?

He deserved to know. He would do it anyway. He should know.

“Miyongi…”

What if he didn’t? What if he did and nothing happened?

She had been sent on a quest but so had he. Somewhere, though fleeting their moments had slipped through their fingers, they both felt it. Tugged at each other’s whim they anchored each other, but no matter what she said there would be no love. There would be no them.

Perhaps the last thing she would see was the world burning.

This had to run its course.

She breathed in and kissed him deeply. Their waters mingled and changed and they pulled away, his hand caught on her shoulder as she pushed him gently towards the hedge.

He nodded, a tear lighting the corner of his eye, and stepped through.

#

Inside the foremost H2OCorp tank, Officer Mendez’s screen registered motion, a single person stepping through the hedges.

“Sarge! They’re sending someone out!” Mendez relayed to his commanding officer.

“Armed?” he responded.

“No. His hands are up, he’s got a small bottle, water possibly.”

“Ok, this is new. Don’t shoot just yet. Might be some kind of parlay.”

There wasn’t much to the man, tall, brown-skinned, skinny, like so many others....

“Sarge! There’s things falling from his hands! He’s raising the bottle over his head!”

“He has seeds! Engage! Engage!”

Twenty rockets rose, locked on Miyongi.

#

They haven’t shot a rocket through me yet, Miyongi thought, breaking through the fruitopia of Garden into the scorching city of dusty aftertastes.

Smoke billowed from buildings in the distance; ahead of him towers stood jagged and torn, and the gleaming rows of tanks wouldn’t wait very long.

He opened his hands over his head, letting the seeds run through his hair to the ground. He reached for his neck, raised the small vial of water, upturned it, and the blast of rockets rang his ears silent.

Miyongi felt a drop trickle through his hair, dislodging a seed and running from his forehead to his nose, tumbling to his lips where he caught it on his tongue, just as the seed bounced off his shoulder to the ground.

The drop dissolved against his palate. He tasted the High Priestess’s waters and felt the ground tremble; smelled Naisha’s neck and felt the ground shake; he felt his grandmother’s arms and the ground tearing open.

The last of the droplet vanished.

The ground erupted under him.

The rockets hit home.

#

On the mattress of a cirrus cloud overlooking the planet, fragments of ice broke from trembling eyelids to the flutter of tiny wings.

   She remembered dreaming of a life of parched moments and skin stretched over bones like parchment, of mischief, of things growing, of a kiss and oblivion. She couldn’t remember being before, she remembered being the dream.

   Through the thin layer of clouds something rose from the ground to meet her.

Her wings sent a ripple through the atmosphere. Billions of frozen eyes cracked open, wisps of clouds drawn to each other, spiraling in circles over and around her. They stared at the impossible thing, and as the dream faded, as the tallest of the branches brushed her puff of vapor, she heard herself thinking: Good luck cutting through a baobab you shit-water drinking….

She giggled, a murmur echoing contagiously through the sky. Her little ribs ached, and a lonely tear rolled down her cheek and through the mist.

#

Naisha lifted herself up; a hulking tree’s roots only a few feet ahead of her, clouding her vision as far as she could see. There was no trace of Miyongi; there was no trace of most of Garden.

Dry air spun around her. She coughed, her aching lungs answered by thousands of thirsty throats.

It hasn’t rained, it will never rain, Miyongi died and it will never rain. It hasn’t rained….

She felt her mind melting in empty litany, when a soulectric tingle submerged her body with static, and laughter spurted around her; impossible, inappropriate laughter that poured down on her, laughed right through her, and drew her eyes upward.

A vibrating mass of clouds swirled in vortexes around the highest branches, plunging the city into shadow for the first time in millennium. The laughter turned to thunder, a rich groan that rolled brontide through the sky and exploded in anger.

A drop hit her nose.

She raised her finger toward it as another hit her forehead, then her lips. It stuck her clothes to her frame, thickened to a curtain and blanked out the world.

She turned to the armed survivors behind her, their dripping faces glued to the sky, hesitant to laugh along with the Nymphs, but ready to fight. This was the moment she had been waiting for. The moment she had trained for her whole life.

“Don’t just stand there staring!” She yelled at them. “Make your way around this thing and charge!”

#

Naisha stood on a hill overlooking a gently flowing river. It wasn’t a very large river, those who had rediscovered swimming could cross it in barely a few strokes, but it ran deep and it ran far.

There would be rain in the evening. Wooly nimbus clouds rolled on the horizon, streaks of virgae floating beneath, their moisture surfing ahead on the eastern winds.

But it would be hours, and the faithful waited on her to commune. They had fought hard, and millions had drowned.

Somewhere deep below the towers eroded, the train tracks rusted away in darkness, the decayed world they’d known, but they had won. They had struggled to rebuild, and what they needed now was healing. She turned to face them; hundreds of thousands with eyes only for her and her fellow priestesses. Miyongi’s Tree a lone mountain rising from the Sea of Tears hundreds of miles behind them, piercing into the bluish clouds, its myriad branches twisting into and over the waves, stretching infinitely in her mind as she danced along them bathed in shadow, the clarity of day drowned away in the fault lines of her memory as her eyes milked over with the first true breaths of a new world.

She embraced the darkness and removed her white dress, letting the moist breeze humidify her naked flesh, felt her chest dampen slightly, sat on her wooden chair, covered her breasts with her hair, knocked her head back, and spread her legs.

Behold the great flood!