Air Like Water

Corinna Wagner

Osman hears a shout as if someone is in pain and peers out across the rice paddy, holding his hand over his eyes to shield them from the glare of the sun . He can see his father standing in the middle of the field, with his arms clutched to the back of his neck, shaking his head, clawing at his skin .

There is no obvious cause for distress, except for the smell, the insistent smell that the breeze carries . It is the smell of garbage and rot and, as he bends to remove his shoes, Osman realises that it is pervasive and that he has become used to it . He cannot remember what the air smelled like before when he and his friends used to play football near here . It didn’t smell . It just was . They would draw in great lungfuls of it as they raced and tackled and kicked and chased the ball and they never even thought about what they were sucking in and breathing out . It was air and it was there for them to breathe . Sometimes it had a flavour of the river in it, reedy and green, and sometimes a flavour of the sun-warmed soil, but these flavours came and went .

He straightens and looks beyond his father, now bent to the earth, across the river to the bottling factory on the other bank . It is a squat grey building with tall chimneys, puffing out dark smoke into the blue sky . That’s what brought their football playing to an end . After it was built and started pumping its fumes into the atmosphere, the air stopped being so breathable .

He shakes his fist at in an impotent gesture . Air should be breathable . At least that .

Osman’s father has probably found some plastic residue . He has complained of it before . Tilling in preparation for the summer harvest takes him longer now . He worries about the little pieces that might escape his search, the tiny particles that find their way into everything . Still, his father does what he can, picks out all that he finds, piece by piece, and carries on . It is increasingly difficult to maintain the farm, especially at this time of year, flood season, when the water washes through the paddies . But they manage . They adapt . You can adapt to anything, any change, Osman thinks . But he wishes that, just for once, the change could be for the better .

Shovel in hand, he squelches barefoot towards his father but the gut-wrenching stench that rises from the ground, stirred up by his feet, stops him . This smell has gone to a whole new level . He stares down struck by a sudden horror . That his toes will corrode in this stinking mud, the flesh will be stripped from the bone . He wriggles them to make sure they are still there and lets out the same cry that his father emitted not five minutes since .

The water is tarry red and purple . The water that irrigates their land, that feeds the plants, that grows the rice his father sells to feed him and his brother and sisters and mother and grandmother is not clear as it should be, but dark and murky .

He closes his eyes and stands swaying in the dark potion . He remembers the vibrant greens the rice used to have and the calls of the storks that flew overhead . Air doesn’t smell and water is transparent, he thinks . Isn’t that how things should be?

Then he collects himself, grits his teeth and wades on . No water no rice . No rice no money . No money no university for Osman is what he thinks as he moves forward through the filth .

His father is pulling up the tainted rice in the patch where he stands and throwing it into his bucket . As if that will make a difference when the contamination has spread over the whole field . The factory must have just let all their poisonous waste spill undiluted into the river .

‘Help me,’ his father says .

With every strike of the shovel, Osman feels his rage growing . Help . What does help mean in the face of this pollution?

You can adapt to anything, any change, until you can’t .