Scarlett Hopper's Arc

Chapter 2 of 33

Scarlett woke on the floor of the house with her mouth dry as paper. She had healed a bed of roots the day before and dropped like a cut rope. Now her tongue stuck to her teeth. She reached for her canteen and found it light. She tipped the last swallow into her mouth. It tasted like tin. Duke lay across the doorway. He lifted his head, and a picture pushed into her mind: a cracked cistern behind the house, dry to the bottom. She had not looked there yet. "Show me," she said. She followed him out the back. The cistern sat under a broken gutter, split down one side. Empty. The pipe above it hung loose from the eave. Beyond the yard, the garden rows waited. She could not heal another bed without water in her. She could not water a single root without something to carry it in. She went back inside and pulled everything from the cupboards. A steel pot. Two plastic buckets. A length of rubber hose stiff with age. Under the sink she found a canister, sealed, still bright. A pre-collapse water filter, the housing clear, the cartridge white and dry. She turned it in her hands. The threads were clean. It would work. She climbed to the roof with the hose over her shoulder. Duke watched from the yard. The afternoon ash would come soon and she knew it. She worked fast. She bent the loose gutter back against the eave and wedged it with a shim of wood. She ran the hose from the downspout to the mouth of the cistern. She patched the cistern's split with tar from a can in the shed and pressed a strip of tin over the seam. She set the buckets under a second run of gutter on the low roof. She fit the filter to a spigot on the cistern's base with tape wound tight around the threads. The wind came. Gray rolled down the rows. She pulled the black-and-pink mask over her face and kept working until the last bucket was set. Duke pressed against her leg. She went inside with him and shut the door. Rain did not come that night. It came the next. She woke to it hitting the roof in a hard, even wash. She ran outside barefoot. Water sluiced down the patched gutter, through the hose, into the cistern. The buckets filled in minutes. She turned the spigot. Water pushed through the filter and came out the other side clear. She caught a cup of it and drank. It was cold and clean and tasted like nothing. She drank another. Her hands stopped shaking. She filled the buckets from the spigot until her arms ached, then carried the first two out to the rows. The dirt drank them down. In her head, clear as a word spoken beside her, Duke said good.