Wilt

by Gina Ranalli

I lick the sweat pooled in the sunken canyons beneath his eyes, my sandy tongue barely able to slip out from between my crusty brown and yellow lips. My mouth, my body, has become as much of a wasteland as the Earth itself, burned beyond recognition and gasping its last scorched breaths.

But I am alive, as is Mark, though barely.

He doesn’t move much anymore and he’s stopped breathing twice so far. We don’t have much time left and the time we do have is mostly spent sleeping on plastic garbage bags, my feeble attempt to catch any moisture seeping from our bodies. Twice a day, I gently roll him over and gather the bags up, being as careful as I can to not spill what has become no more than a table spoon of moisture. I take the bags outside and tip them just so, allowing our fluids to drip into the desiccated soil of our garden. If it weren’t for those remaining flowers, the California poppies, the owl’s clover and the goldfields, I probably would have no reason to rise at all. Like Mark, I’d just lie on the living room floor, struggling for air and waiting to die.

It’s amazing the wildflowers are alive at all, really. But same as Mark and I, they survived the drought longer than most only because of the well that sits along the back edge of our property. We were able to draw water from that well straight up until a week ago when it finally ran dry. Even the muddy rancid water that had sat moldering at the bottom had been exhausted, replaced by clots of slightly damp sludge ripe with fat black beetles and little unidentifiable albino worms, probably residents of a long dead and rotting tree root.

The death of the well had came as an almost welcomed relief; when the neighbors had been healthy enough to venture over onto our property line, they had usually come armed with steak knives, shovels, sometimes even rifles. Of course that had been when we’d all discovered that this heat wave wasn’t going to end. Not ever. The planet had reached its breaking point and was now being slowly baked to death.

Mark and I had fought the people off easily; we weren’t nearly as crazed and dehydrated as they were. There had been weeping and begging, guilt trips thrown like sharp spears, screamed menacing threats and eventually—regretfully—the spilling of blood and soft pathetic murders.

Some of those people had been our friends. But we hadn’t let that stop us. We were a team, he and I. We’d been one before all this insanity had begun and we would remain so until our last heartbeats.

And that is why we drink from each other. Not only is it survival but it is yet another way that we become one, two halves of a single whole.

The pale blue pills the army had given out—I guess it was three weeks ago now—with the vague explanation that they were “salt reducers,” had sat in our medicine cabinet untouched until the well dried up. The pills were supposedly designed to break down the salt that naturally collects in the human body, salt that causes the process of dehydration to accelerate and in essence kill you faster.

Most people gobbled down their pills just as they were told but Mark and I had had our well and that was doing us just fine. And when there was no more well, we finally remembered the pills, but instead of just swallowing them, hoping that the government was right about this one thing, we decided to try an experiment.

It was a simple experiment: after taking a pill apiece, we waited half an hour and then tasted each other. Our sweat tasted clean and sweet; not even the slightest trace of brininess lingered on our parched tongues.

We’d grinned at each other, our eyes locked and our already naked bodies came together to celebrate the fact that we weren’t done fighting yet.

Not by a long shot.

For the first few days, we were drunk on each other’s perspiration. We drank and drank, lapping each other in the places where the sweat puddles were deepest as we lie together: the hollows above our collarbones, the tiny bowls of our belly buttons, the concave curves at the small of our backs and especially just beneath there, at the top of the ass crack, where the cherished juice is so thick you could almost use a straw to slurp it up.

We became so giddy with it that we often took to sporting underwear for the sole purpose of taking it off later and wringing it into each other’s mouths as a special treat.

Our love knew no bounds.

The days became quenched and lazy. The silence was tremendous. Gone were the sounds of traffic and children screaming and even birdsong. The frogs and crickets no longer chirped at night. Like Adam and Eve, we were alone in the world and that was fine with us. Mark started talking about how maybe the drought had happened for this very reason. Maybe we had been chosen to remake the planet, to give birth to a kinder, gentler species of human, one which would appreciate the Earth and not set out to destroy it.

And that was how the idea of the garden was born.

Knowing we would never be able to provide enough moisture to grow fruit trees, I set out for the gardening store a few blocks from our house, with the intent of scrounging for wildflower seeds. The store, like everywhere else, was empty and vandalized, but obviously had not been the first choice for looting. While the rack which had held vegetable seeds was stripped of all its merchandise, the rack of flower seeds was close to bursting, as if it had just been restocked that very morning.

I carefully chose only my favorites, mindful of the fact that whatever water came to the garden would be less water for ourselves. Our little backyard plot would be modest, but as beautiful as we could make it.

Never religious before, we took to praying; praying that God would be pleased with our efforts and provide us with just enough fluid to keep our garden and each other alive.

And for a time we thought he’d answered our prayers.

The flowers bloomed, blasting forth with a blaze of colors no longer found in nature. Brilliant orange, dazzling deep purple, and a yellow brighter than any tulip, dandelion or daffodil had ever hoped to be.

I spent hours sitting by those fragile blossoms, tending and guarding, tending and guarding, directing any drops of sweat that had beaded on my body to drip into their soil. I built a lean-to to shade them from the blistering sun during the hottest part of the day. The only thing I loved more than those flowers was Mark, who now was showing the wear of prolonged dehydration. We concluded that it must be our attempts to conceive a child that was causing him to dry out faster than me. We doubled his dosage of the government pills, to no avail.

My sweat alone was no longer enough for him and, desperate, I was only able to come up with one final, feeble solution: I let him drink my tears.

The tears have been hard to muster. I’ve never been the crying type; even when the end of the earth was upon us, it was me who held a weeping and terrified Mark to my breast, cooing and consoling, murmuring empty phrases that somehow eased his fear and calmed his soul. It has always been me who people turned to in times of crisis, staring at me with wide frightened eyes, knowing that I would be the one to reassure them, to speak reasonably and soothe their fraying nerves.

Knowing that I would always hold it together and never, never break down. Crying is something I just don’t do.

Then suddenly, the life of my beloved partner depended on the shedding of my tears.

The very first thing I thought of to help me along in this bizarre new endeavor was pain. I know from experience that a good solid whack to the nose is sure to get the waterworks flowing. The pain is so excruciating that tears spring forth like a fountain and will not stop until most of the agony has subsided. The only problem was getting Mark to punch me in the face.

He was extremely reluctant at first but eventually, after much cajoling, he finally agreed and swung unexpectedly. Later he said he thought that taking me by surprise would be easier for him than watching my face and seeing in my eyes that I knew he was going to hit me.

No matter.

The blow connected and although I thought it was rather weak, it still did the job. Not only did tears squirt from my eyes but blood spurted from my nose as well. I quickly coaxed Mark into lapping it all up, the entire mess and when he was done, he wore the most grateful adoring expression I’d ever seen. Despite his peeling red and emaciated face, he glowed like one of God’s own angels, halos of electric blue light radiating around his head. The second time he hit me, my nose broke and I almost hit him back. Somehow, I restrained myself and, when I’d finished screaming, allowed him to drink.

When the nose was no longer an option, we decided that pulling my hair might do the trick and we were right. Mark began wrenching it out by the fistful, huge clots that left my scalp bleeding and nearly bald as I clenched a washcloth between my teeth until I thought they’d shatter like bone beneath a sledgehammer.

Sadly, a person has only a limited amount of hair on their body and this method was quickly exhausted.

It was shortly after my explaining this to Mark for the seventh or eighth time that he went insane. He began attacking me at every opportunity, lunging at me when I least expected it, biting and scratching, doing his best to draw blood instead of tears, as if he craved it more than any other fluid I had to offer him

Fighting him off was easy enough; he was very weak and easily distracted. He began talking to his dead mother, raging at her and demanding she breastfeed him immediately, without delay, right fucking now! His violence and ravings lasted for little more than a day. Since then, he does nothing but lie on the garbage bags, muttering inanities in his sleep and occasionally shouting.

I’ve considered physically hurting him or covering his body with an old wool blanket in order to gather more nutrients for myself but can’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I’ve done my best to keep both him and the flowers alive, slicing my arms and legs with a blade from his razor to make myself feel pain and bring forth the only thing I have: my own life, drop by precious drop.

But now, despite all my efforts, the flowers are wilting and Mark is shriveling into dust like the corpse of a yellow-jacket on a windowsill, dead for many summers.

Before my eyes, he is mummifying.

In the garden, eyes blackened and nose swollen to the size of a small lemon, absently scratching at the scabs on my head where hair used to be, I gaze down at the collection of slices on my limbs, some of which are still oozing blood while others freely weep a fascinating yellow-green pus. I consider the possibilities for this new gift my body is producing...Then, without thinking, I abruptly take the razor and begin severing the flowers from their stems at the half point and I realize that this is what I’d planned all along. The garden had nothing to do with Adam and Eve or God and His divine plans. Those ideas had only been so much hopeful idiocy, the delirium caused by dying a slow, cruel death.

When all the flowers have been cut, I gather them up and go back inside to find Mark where I left him on the living room floor. I count the seconds between his breaths: 45.

Lying down beside him, propped on an elbow, I sprinkle our bodies with the near-dead flowers before relaxing against him, my head on his chest. Of course, my sweetheart wears the majority of color and I close my eyes, smiling.

I dream of rain.