It was cool.
I knew the rules.
* * *
I didn’t know the rules.
The rules were bullshit.
I was thinking about classroom sizes and museums and violent crime and copper scrappers. I was thinking about street violence and friends from broken homes and arson and unemployment. Too many guns and too little supervision. These were the problems I was trying to puzzle out. Meanwhile, the city went under state receivership and started drawing water from the Flint River instead of the Great Lakes by way of Detroit. The rest is a sad story told across the world by now: the river water wasn’t treated properly; it leached lead and other junk from the pipes into tap water. A lot of people drank that water. A lot of people got very sick. Government officials tried to cover up the catastrophe, leading to more sickness, more delays, more damage.
I had never banked on the water going bad.
In all my youthful exuberance, my desire to bring my girls up here, in my community, my pride, my home, I thought I had covered all of the bases, but water is fundamental, the number-two necessity for humans after breathable air. A place that tries to damage you with its water is damaging in the most basic way. And so, I stayed alert each night, watching Ruby bathe, conscious that this isn’t right, that this is supposed to be safe, that she would only be safe, for sure, through our unfailing vigilance.
* * *
Ruby doesn’t know that the water in this city is bad. Dangerous.
Mary, her five-year-old sister, understands it in a straightforward way, like Darth Vader, like busy traffic, a risk to be avoided. She knows that she shouldn’t drink the water just like she shouldn’t talk to strangers in strange cars. This loss of innocence and the anonymous lies that prompted it make me sad and angry. Sometimes, it keeps me up at night, thinking of all the injury, the hurt, the real hurt, physical, mental; the loss of trust, the enormity of that loss, the immensity of betrayal; the contempt of those officials who have treated us—treated our children—like expendable animals. Lab rats. Numbers and statistics that might be converted into a political liability, and what a pain in the ass we are for that reason. I’ve dreamed about it more than once. What if the tests the city conducted on our household water were wrong? What if we didn’t act quickly enough? What was this place going to look like in fifteen years? Who was going to be left?
Mary is a bright five-year-old. She is old enough to understand some of this. Not old enough to feel the outrage, but old enough to notice the contradiction and confusion. “It’s expensive,” we tell her. “Why can’t we drink it?” she asks. “Well,” I tell her, “you can wash your hands in it, but don’t drink it. Don’t you drink it. Even if it’s the middle of the night and you’re thirsty, come and wake me up. I’ll get you a glass. You’re right. The world isn’t right and the world isn’t fair.”
Some of these are conversations every father expects to have with his child, but not so soon, and certainly not about the unsafe tap water that costs you $130 each month. Not in the first state to light its darkened city streets with streetlamps. Not in the U.S. state that put the world on wheels and taught it to move with speed.
Ruby isn’t even two yet. She doesn’t see the confusion or the contradiction. For Ruby, the confusion is much simpler: she likes to dip the plastic cup in her bathwater and take a drink when she can. We freak out, lunge forward, snatch up that cup, and toss it to the floor. Ruby yells in surprise and disappointment, at the loud noise, our worried faces, the brief chaos of moving hands and water spray.
She’ll relax again, in a few moments, when we soothe her with a song, or give her something else to play with.
We’ll relax, too, when the last of the water has finally vanished down the drain.
Contributors
HUDA AL-MARASHI’s essays have appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Al Jazeera, the Rumpus, the Offing, and elsewhere. Excerpts from her memoir-in-progress can be found in the anthologies Love Inshallah: The Secret Love Lives of Muslim American Women, Becoming: What Makes a Woman, and Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women and Extreme Religion.
ERIC ANDERSON is the owner of Comics Are Go, a comic book store in Sheffield Village, Ohio, and the author of a collection of poems, The Parable of the Room Spinning (Kattywompus Press).
MARTHA BAYNE is a Chicago-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in the Chicago Reader, Buzzfeed, the Baffler, Belt Magazine, the Rumpus, Latterly, and other outlets. She is the editor of Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology, the founder of the Soup & Bread community meal project, and a member of Theater Oobleck’s artistic ensemble.
JOHN LLOYD CLAYTON is a writer and teacher in Chicago.
CONNOR COYNE has written two novels—Shattering Glass and Hungry Rats—and Atlas, a collection of short stories, all inspired by the past, present, and future of Flint, Michigan. His website is ConnorCoyne.com and he can be found on Facebook (facebook.com/connorcoyne) and Twitter (@connorcoyne). He lives in Flint with his wife, two daughters, and an adopted rabbit.
G. M. DONLEY is a writer, designer, and photographer. Donley is a longtime resident of Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
SALLY ERRICO is the deputy managing editor at strategy + business and the former web manager at The New Yorker. Her writing and editing also has appeared in The New York Times, The Independent, the Observer, the Rumpus, and Northern Ohio
