The Summer Kinnick Flats Hauled Its Water: A Narrative Prompt

Exemplar response

The first thing I noticed was the sound the tap made. Not water. A dry cough, then nothing, then my mother saying my name from the kitchen in a voice I had not heard before.

That was the last Tuesday in June. By Friday there was a white tank the size of a delivery truck sitting in the school lot, and a folding table beside it with a clipboard and a coffee can full of pens. Mrs. Ospina from the council checked names off the list. Everyone got the same amount per person. We carried it in two blue camping jugs and a stockpot with a lid that never fit.

Our jugs weighed forty pounds full. My brother and I worked out a system where we walked eleven steps, set them down, shook out our hands, and picked them up again. Eleven steps was as far as I could go before my fingers stopped closing. By the third week I could make twenty. I was proud of that in a way I did not tell anyone about.

The line at the tank was where the town happened that summer. People stood in it at seven in the morning with their hair wet from the gym showers, and the smell of chlorine came off everyone at once. Mr. Deraney, who had run the cafe for nineteen years, stood in line like everybody else, three weeks after he put the sign in his window. He never said the word closed. He said, "I'm resting the grill." Nobody corrected him. That is how I learned that people will hand you a version of a thing, and you can take it.

The middle weeks were the worst, because the emergency stopped being an emergency and turned into a chore. In July the tanker was late two days in a row. On the second day a man I did not know started shouting at Mrs. Ospina about it, and she let him finish, and then she said the driver had a flat outside Ledge Hill and would be here at four. He apologized. She wrote his name on the list.

The night the Cardoza family left, they knocked on our door to give us their freezer food. Diego was in my grade. His mother stood on the step with a grocery bag of frozen peas and would not come in. She said they were going to her sister's until the well was fixed, and everybody understood by then that the second half of that sentence was the part you did not lean on. Diego did not come back in September. He does not answer messages much.

I thought all summer that what I was learning was how much water a person uses. That number is easy, and I could recite it by August. Standing in that line every morning, I found out something slower. Our town was never one thing. It was a set of arrangements people had agreed to and then forgotten they had agreed to, and the water was one of them, and when that arrangement failed you could see all the others underneath it, still holding, mostly.

In September the rig came. It ran for six days and the noise carried up the bench, and on the seventh day the tap in our kitchen made a sound like an argument and then ran brown for two minutes and then ran clear. My mother filled a glass and did not drink it. She set it on the sill where the light came through it, and we both looked at it for a while, and then she poured it out and filled the glass again.

I still walk eleven steps and want to set something down.

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