FreeWrite 2/20/07: Being, food and love

The crops were greying from the lack of sun and water. Drought plagued the region for a year or two now, though no one aside from the scientists can remember exactly when it started. It felt like ten years of near starvation and dehydration.

The lack and want created innovations and problems. Each household was now equipped with tools to recycle waste products into fresh drinking water. Washers were made more efficient and the water from that, the tub and the kitchen sink was coveted like a precious jewel. This was the benefit of lack, the doing without for long periods of time that drives an individual to figure out new ways to generate the essentials.

It was the want, the desire that troubled most people. Irma had read in one of the last papers to be produced (for even those were going out of style from lack of resources, the trees died and the process of making paper consumed more that it provided), that teams of people, water gangs, the term was coined, made a job out of raiding swimming pools and public bathrooms and selling the water on the wet market, another new term coined.

Irma looked out her kitchen window, at the indentation in the earth, coated with cracking concrete, that marked the place where her pool had been. It had not been targeted because it was already emptied, its resources already utilized.

She moved around in her skin, her dried and cracking skin that she felt compelled to rub against the cabinets, door frames and the shriveled hulk of the tree near the front door, scratching herself like a pachyderm or rhino, that have loose skin, grooved with tributaries of wrinkles.