The Taste of Old Water

The water from the city taps tasted of iron, chimney soot, and limestone boiled three times over. For two thousand five hundred and fifty-five days not a single drop of moisture had fallen from the sky, yet the folk of San Telmo del Viento still laid white handkerchiefs across the rooftops at dusk, as though night might take pity on their pale offering and return a dew no one quite remembered how to name.

Vera unlatched the shutter of the clockmaker’s workshop with the measured care of someone handling fractured porcelain. Outside, the Boulevard of the Lindens wore a fine, golden dust that clung to eyelashes and coat collars. Far above, suspended three hundred meters over the main dome of the astronomical observatory, the Drop hovered: vast, translucent, a liquid diamond the size of a carriage that defied gravity and reason alike.

—It’s still there —murmured her grandfather from the back of the workshop, never lifting his loupe from the anchor of a wall clock—. Seven years gazing down without falling. It’s an insolence of the air.

Vera glanced down at the palms of her hands. When she woke, her bedsheets were bone dry, yet her fingertips retained a damp chill, the touch of moss and springwater that vanished the moment her feet touched the waxed pine floorboards. She had dreamed of a pond blanketed in walnut leaves, and a woman’s voice whispering: «Never drink from another’s memory unless you are ready to drown within it».

She picked up the amber glass vial where she kept the chloride reagent and stepped into the alley. At the corner of the central market, the town crier announced the week’s water rations: two quarts per registered family. No one protested. Silence was the drought’s deepest custom.

Vera quickened her pace toward the Plaza of the Dry Obelisk. She knew that before noon, when sunlight struck the precise angle of the Drop, the reflection cast upon the façade of the municipal archives would project the silhouette of what the city had lost: a river that no longer appeared on any modern map.