"The Last Well" by Abi

The well behind the school had always been shallow, but now it was dry.Mira stood over it at dawn, watching dust spiral where water used to shimmer. The bucket hit the bottom with a hollow thud. She didn’t need to look to know it was empty again.

In her village, every family had built tanks on their roofs, waiting for the government’s promised pipes. They never came. Rain fell twice last year, the second time for only ten minutes. “Climate shift,” her teacher called it, tracing melting patterns on a faded map. The adults simply said, “the sky forgot us.”

Her father once farmed rice, but the paddies cracked open like broken mirrors. He now grew cactus and barley — crops that asked for less. Sometimes he walked to the desalination plant by the coast, trading hours of labor for a few buckets of gray, recycled water. Mira thought of it as borrowed time, water with memory.

One evening, the radio crackled with a new word: rationing. Two hours of tap flow a day. Arguments broke out between districts, even families. Water had become something you measured in silence, like breath.

But Mira still filled her small jar each morning. She used half to wash her face, half to water the single seedling by her window — a basil sprout that had somehow survived. She whispered to it, as if her voice could become rain.

Someday, she hoped, the well would sing again — not just with water, but with the sound of enough.