By Autumn Bettinger

Wind sucked the moisture from our lips and the sweat from our skin. Our knuckles were distended and parched—sometimes they bled. 

I felt the waiting.

I climbed ponderosa trunks to get to our shed’s metal roof. My brother, too little to follow, waited below and listened to my feet pounding like a tinny thunderstorm. I’d look for distant clouds and see too much thirsty blue sky.

~

In the fourth month of the drought, the only thing our father could dredge from the well was a great shuddering cough of stale earth. We were all quiet then. My father’s eyes turned skyward, a delicate hope buried inside. My brother kicked the iron pipe, his faded hand-me-down shoe coming back red with old paint chips. 

The next day my mom, who I often caught staring out at her dying flower beds, helped Dad lower the well pump in their never-ending quest for water. She handed him tool after tool, her attention wandering to my brother. He sat in a soft pile of Sierra dust, chasing ants with a magnifying glass until they immolated into tiny puffs of smoke. 

~

A month later, Mom’s flowers had withered to dust, all except a ratty bundle of California yarrow by my bedroom window. I helped pull up the dry, colorless husks of her more delicate plants: prize-winning dahlias and once-vibrant orange zinnias. She looked to the sky with hard, vengeful eyes. She was keeping score.

~

A handful of dusty, cloudless nights passed before I woke to the smell of bruised chrysanthemums. My brother was a lump of covers and splayed limbs on the other side of the room. His nightlight, always shifting through the rainbow, moved from green to blue, lighting up our room with a slowly spinning kaleidoscope of stars.

I slid out of bed and crept towards the open window. I pressed my stomach against the sill and inhaled. Every dry, patchy piece of me knew that smell.

Rain was falling, little thuds of salvation deadened by the dirt. The yarrow bent low under fat drops that untangled their feathered, limp leaves, tiny abrasions releasing their chrysanthemum smell. I pushed my hands into the thick air as moisture hit my freckles and cleaned out the nicks in my cracked skin. I could just make out my mother in the dark garden. She sat in an empty flower bed, cross-legged, palms flat to the earth. Her face turned up, mouth open, eyes closed. A woman with a wet victory in her pocket. 

I woke my brother, and we watched as our mother glimmered in the wet dark like a fallen angel. We ran into the night. Cool droplets tangled in our hair and spattered away the grime that settled on our skin like pigment. We cupped our small hands and drank. We cried and hugged and collapsed together, born again.

When Dad came onto the porch that morning, coffee in hand, he found the three of us asleep on the swing—mud still wedged between our toes and our lips still plump with borrowed moisture. The sun rose on a morning already scalding away. Wet dirt turned to dust, puddles evaporating into empty steam. We smiled as we slept, dreams of storms to come collecting between us.