Drought Read Online Free PDF

Water.
    “I should have drawn it the night he ran way,” he says. “My memory is already fading.”
    “We thought he was coming back any day,” Hope says.
    “Why does he let us suffer for so long?” I ask.
    Boone does not answer.
    Ellie lays her hand on my cheek, just as she did on Mother’s. “We suffer because we are Otto’s chosen children.”
    “He chose us to suffer?” I ask, hating how small and petulant my voice sounds.
    “He chose us to live!” Hope exclaims.
    “In time he’ll come,” Boone says. I notice, now, how pinched his face is.
    “You’ll not leave until you’re healed tonight,” I tell Boone.
    He shakes his head. “There’s no need.”
    “And who will fill Ellie’s cup tomorrow?” I ask. “Not you, with a lame foot.”
    “He needn’t take the Water,” Ellie says. “He needn’t do that for me.”
    “Not every person has to be as stubborn as you,” I tell her. “Let me heal him, especially since you won’t let me heal you.” It has been a long, painful argument between us. She will not accept a single extra bit of Water. She will only take what Darwin permits at weekly Communion.
    Mother says that most Congregants would not be so selfless. “If they all knew, they’d bleed you dry,” she always tells me.
    I discovered my blood was special long ago, back when I was barely half the height of Mother … long before Otto’s blood ran out.
    Mother had forced me to come on one of her trapping trips, sneaking into the woods on a drizzly, dark night to steal extra food for the Congregants. I liked the food. I hated the trapping.
    We had to be silent in case one of the Overseers cared to check the woods at night. Darwin thought he controlled every morsel that went into our mouths.
    There was barely a moon, and the clouds curtained the stars. But Mother was silent in the woods, as if she could see a clear path in front of her. My feet seemed to find every crackly branch and leaf.
    “Toe to heel, toe to heel,” Mother whispered. Still my feet stumbled. With my every sound her shoulders raised and her fists clenched, but after a while she gave up trying to remind me.
    I hoped, after every trip, that my clumsiness would save me from checking the traps with her. But she still insisted that I come along. “You’ll learn how to trap,” she said, “the same way my father taught me.”
    So I followed her that night as she glided to the squirrel trap tree. It was deep in the woods, so deep that we didn’t even come this way for gathering water. Mother had baited loops of rope hanging off limbs, and at least a dozen squirrels had fallen into her trap. They strangled before they even got to eat the bait.
    Mother let out a small, triumphant laugh and clapped her hands together once. Then she set off to the nearest squirrel. Their shadowed small bodies swung from the ropes, moving slightly in the night wind as if they’d just been caught. I hung back, feeling like I’d come across something private, something I shouldn’t get near. But Mother didn’t even pause. She strode up to the first one and cut it loose. Then she tossed it back over her shoulder.
    It was my job to catch them—and hold them, all the way home. That night I was feeling especially reluctant. I let the first one drop in the leaves, then bent to pick it up by the bit of string left around its neck. It smelled like musk and blood.
    “Use the tail. We can’t afford you dropping even one,” Mother whispered.
    “They’re only a bite or two,” I told her.
    Mother came to my side so fast, it was as if she flew. “Every bite matters,” she said, her voice low and intense. “Never turn aside food.”
    My stomach growled like it was agreeing with her.
    “Hold it tight,” Mother ordered.
    I’d been alive for decades. I knew I should be able to carry a few dead squirrels, especially if it meant feeding hungry Congregants. So I swallowed and grabbed the tail.
    It was cold and bristly, nothing like the way I