A father and son are walking the dusty streets of an arid town grown far beyond its limits, sprawling for miles of endless dwellings, most temporary and few substantial enough to last very long in this climate. Everywhere, there are crowds in the narrow streets and street vendors with very limited stock, eking out a losing living.

They are looking for water. They got water and food yesterday at an NGO. The food was bland but filling and the water was pure--unlike most of the muddy and insect laden that was their usual drink. They had three days… probably less, before they would dry up and blow away with the desert wind. Overeating was being felt, too. Their shrunken stomachs just couldn't take it.

The NGO ran out of food and water and pulled out with their trucks just after the hungry had eaten and promised that they would be back in a month. But promises were like the dust that blew through this perilous land. Just as fleeting.

The boy, maybe eight years old, vaguely remembered his mother. She had been trying to give birth to his sister in their village many kilometers from this place, but died. They had no midwife and his father could not help his mother as he watched her bleed to death, crying. Perhaps the boy was putting it out of his mind. Perhaps it was just the heat, the exhaustion, and the lack of water.

The father remembered more. But he was trying to forget, too. He had been a farmer. His father gave him one fourth of his land. The other three fourths going to his three brothers… now gone. In the good years that small patch of ground with three fruit trees was enough to sustain them. In the bad years, it was not.

Each year got dryer and the monsoon came later with less water. The father's crops failed along with all the others in the village. People began leaving. All began starving. As long as he had food for his wife and his son, the father thought he could hold out--hope for a better year—next year. Three years earlier, the monsoon came with a flood. Many in the village drowned. The stinking muddy mess that was left quickly evaporated and the longest, driest period yet was upon them. The crops failed once again. Even the fruit trees died. They ate the seeds for planting, snakes, lizards, locusts and termites--all that was left--just to survive. Farming had driven all the wild game far away. There was nothing to hunt anymore. 

Mother was weak from lack of food and water. That's why she died giving birth to a sister that never lived. Reality set in. So many had died from disease, hunger and thirst. They were the last to leave. All of the mud homes were abandoned, left to disintegrate into the desert that was forming with each day, each month, and each year. It was as relentless as the Sahara. They had to leave or die.

They wandered for many days, father and son. Lost all they carried bartering for food or water and finally, the father's watch and belt to robbers. The robbers not only took everything they had, they beat them both bloody. It was senseless, but that's the way things were. Brutal.

Finally coming to this great city of humanity and not much else, they stayed with nowhere else to go. There were riches here. Some people knew how to gain the upper hand and take from everyone else. The rich lived in fine houses in special, walled communities, growing richer and more ruthless the more people arrived.

But most lived in the ramshackle mosaic of brick, mud, metal, cardboard and canvas that constituted most of housing for a city of refugees from the relentless drying of the continent. Those that had, sold or bartered what they had in order to continue to live. But starvation was everywhere. Even among those who had homes, humble as they were, and businesses, meager as they were. Most of this city was slowly dying.

But the father and son had nothing and could only beg. They continued on until nightfall when the blistering heat of the day no longer sucked the lifeblood from them. Their skin was now blackened by the sun and stretched thin over their bony bodies. The son had the distinct signs of marasmus with no cure in sight. They had to find a place to lay their heads for the night.

They ended up on the side of a mud building out of the wind but not out of the cold. All they had was what they wore. The father's cut off pants they took from a dead man on their way to the city tied off with a rope and the son's shorts. Fine for the heat of the day, but no protection after the sun went down. They huddled together and shivered until dawn. Tried to sleep for a while in the morning sun until someone kicked dirt on them and told them to leave.

And dirt they were. They only got washed when it rained. Water was just too precious. They spent the rest of that day looking for water and food but were turned down by everyone; most almost as desperate as they. Things were looking bleak when they crawled up under a cart for the night. The son cried softly from hunger. The father, in pain himself, could do nothing. Without water, the next day would be their last.

Weak and dehydrated, they both managed to get up that morning and continue on. Just as the sun began to take its toll on them, the father saw a water vendor up ahead and they approached him. Unfortunately, the father noticed that it was the same vendor that had denied them two days earlier. His heart fell.  But, they had to try.

The water vendor saw that they were dying and decided to act. He gave them water from a tank of distilled urine that his wife made from makeshift toilets in his neighborhood. Even though it was distilled, it was filled with vermin of indistinct origin. Father and son gladly drank it and felt energized enough to move forward and find some scraps of rotting fruit or bones to chew on for another night and into another day.

Each day the rich sent out wagons throughout the sprawling city to pick up the dead and take them to a place where they were burned. Father and son would be picked up soon. And take their place among the ashes blown in the dusty wind.

Copyright 2017 © Ronald W. Hull

3/15/17