Parched Read Online Free

from years of neglect.
    Musa’s breath scraped through his parched throat—so loud he was sure the sound would give him away and lead the men with their guns right to him. Through any door, behind every tattered window shade, someone could be watching, ready to turn him in. They would hand him over for a single bottle of water.
    So Musa ran and didn’t look back. The air rattled through his lungs, and his every pulse stabbed at the sores on his ankles and wrists.
    When the sky over his shoulder began to pale, the ruined pavement and the press of ramshackle buildings gave way to packed-dirt roads and a few scattered shacks. Musa kept running until he crested a low rise, his feet stuttering at the sudden absence of anything man-made. He stopped, swaying on his feet, and turned to look back the way he had come.
    The city filled his vision, the smoggy sunrise bleeding through the gaps between buildings. He squinted, looking for a plume of dust, listening for the sound of an engine revving. But the air was still, and the city, for now, was quiet.
    Maybe no one was chasing him. Maybe Sivo had died back there.
    Musa turned to face the dusty wasteland that stretched to the horizon: brown dirt, brown grasses, and a few rocky brown hills. Even the trees were brown: leafless skeletons jutting out of the cracked earth.
    His body begged for rest, but he couldn’t stop. Not yet. Musa limped into the desert.
    When the afternoon sun was at its hottest, when he was moments away from collapse, Musa’s footsteps led him to the half-buried roots of a baobab tree. He looked up through a tangle of branches casting a web of shade over him.
    A thread of song scraped past his throat, lifting into the air and smoothing the pain from his face. Scraps of a lullaby—Dingane’s favorite.
    I’ll find it for you, Umama,
Dingane had said each time their mother finished the song.
I’ll find the secret of the baobab tree.
    But it was the younger brother who had heard the water stored in caverns inside the massive trunk.
    Was that why, Dingane?
    Musa laid a hand against the bark.
    He could hear it now, a tinny hum tickling the base of his skull. Musa plucked a long, hollow blade of brown grass and worked it into a crease in the bark. He sucked until his cheeks ached, sucked until he thought he would faint. Until water began to trickle onto his tongue.
    He drank, his legs wobbling beneath him.
    Musa left the straw in place and slung a leg over a low-lying branch. He climbed into the canopy, settled into a wide notch, and sank into sleep.

10
Sarel
    The aloe grew in the west. Sarel remembered that much from before.
    She walked away from the homestead alone. The sky before her was smeared with the grays and butter yellows of dawn. The wind plucked at her tattered cotton shirt and teased the frayed ends of her shorts. Her hands were jammed into fists, her bottom lip caught between her front teeth.
    Before she had taken a dozen strides, Nandi loped up to her, tail swinging, nose lifted to catch the scent of the place they were headed. The pups hurried to follow. And then the whole pack was with Sarel, trotting up or falling back, but always surrounding her.
    Just like before.
    It had been their habit every day, Sarel and her mother, to set out into the desert with a small jug of water, a rifle, and at least five full-grown dogs. Sarel would carry a satchel over her shoulder, the wind lifting it away from her back and cooling the sweaty skin beneath. Coming home, it would bang against the backs of her knees with each step, full of the tough-skinned fruit or tubers they’d gathered.
    Every bush and blooming grass was a lesson. Sarel’s mother taught her which cacti held water, which grasses made for the tightest weave, what trees had long taproots reaching deep down to hidden pools of water. She learned the secrets of soil and rocks. How limestone, dolomite, and sandstone pulled rainwater down, tunneled it through tiny pores