My name is Imani Cole, and I have never been this thirsty in my life.
It started with a little girl’s voice that didn’t match the size of her body. Barely taller than the kitchen counter, she stood with both hands clasped in front of her as if she’d been taught to hold her needs like a secret.
“Ma’am,” she said, looking up at me, “I can’t have no water. My daddy said it got calories I don’t need.”
I laughed because it felt safer than screaming. “Water doesn’t have—” I stopped. She was serious. Her eyes were old in the way children’s eyes get when grown folks break the world in front of them and call it parenting. Behind her, at the table, her father sat like a court judge who’d already reached a verdict. He didn’t bother to look at me. He just tapped two fingers on the wood: one, two, one, two—like a metronome training the whole house to his rhythm.
“No water,” he said, and the tap-tap stopped. “Not for girls who ain’t earned it.”
Earned. Water.
I felt my throat tighten, a prickle rising like I’d swallowed sand. “Since when does water—”
He finally looked at me. That was worse than being ignored. There was nothing in his gaze but a reservoir of rules, deep and dry at the same time.
“Since I said,” he answered.
The little girl looked at me again, apologizing with her eyes for a logic she didn’t own. I filled a glass anyway. The faucet coughed, then cleared its throat, and the water ran bright and alive. I crouched to her height. “You can drink this,” I whispered. “Your body needs it.”
Before she could reach, his chair scraped hard enough to bite the floor. The glass sweated in my hand. I imagined what it would feel like to pour it on a burning sidewalk, to watch it vanish, to watch something necessary disappear like it had never been there in the first place.
“Imani,” he said, and my name sounded like a warning label. “Not your house. Not your rules.”
The glass tilted. I steadied it. The little girl waited, hands still folded, as if the act of wanting water was a sin and the prayer for it had to be silent.
Then the scene changed—like dreams do, with no doors.
We were outside the restaurant, the heat clinging to my back like a wet shirt, neon fizzing above us. My brother Daniel bounced on his heels, smiling too big and talking too fast—his excitement always a performance for a crowd that didn’t know it was a crowd until he arrived. He’d texted: *Taking my favorite ladies out.* I assumed that meant me, our sister Saige, and her daughter Jayla. A simple dinner. Laugh a little, talk a little, chase the weird from my head with something like normal.
But Saige had brought a friend. The friend had brought perfume that walked into rooms before she did. She stood a step ahead of us, toeing the line between glamorous and ominous, her dress the color of a bruise. “I’m Tahlia,” she said to me like we’d already met in a darker story.
Daniel threw an arm around Saige and Jayla. “My two favorite ladies!” he announced, like he was about to cut a ribbon. Then, without looking at me, he added, “You can tag along if you want.”
I blinked. His girlfriend—Tasha—had been left at home like a pair of shoes that didn’t match his outfit today. I opened my mouth to say something smart, then closed it because Jayla had slipped her hand into mine, and there’s something about a child trusting you that makes you choose quiet more carefully.
Tahlia smiled with a shape that wasn’t friendly. “We should go in,” she suggested, but it sounded like an order. Her hand brushed my arm—cool, dry, expensive.
The host led us through a room of clinking glasses and whispers. We slid into a booth: Daniel and Saige on one side, Jayla and me on the other. Tahlia sat at the edge like a punctuation mark deciding whether this sentence was going to end or explode.
Menus fell open like wings. I drank my water too fast, like I was cheating at something. When the server took our order, Jayla asked for lemonade in a voice that almost dared the universe to deny her twice.
“Water,” Saige cut in, cheeks flushing. “For her.”
Jayla’s mouth folded on itself. She stared down, the way kids learn to memorize the pattern of tables, floors, any surface safer than a face.
“Lemon wedges are free,” Tahlia murmured, turning to me. “Calories are everywhere if you look hard enough.” She tapped her temple. “I was taught to look very hard.”
“Who taught you?” I asked.
She smiled like a switchblade opening. “Disappearance did.”
The server returned with a tall glass for me, sweating in sympathy. Tahlia reached into her purse—a quiet, smooth motion like slipping a hand beneath a sleeping dog’s jaw. She placed a small velvet box on the table and slid it toward me with two fingers. The box was the color of secrets. The kind that sit in the bottom of a drawer, wrapped in receipts and reasons.
“For you,” she said.
I didn’t touch it.
“Open it,” Daniel encouraged, too busy playing host to notice the way the air had cooled around us.
I lifted the lid.
Inside were ears.
I don’t mean jewelry shaped like ears. Not novelty. Not metaphor.
Human. Small. Pale, with the soft curve of cartilage that still remembered a face. Each lobe pierced with delicate gold hoops. The skin had that waxed museum look that dared you to call it fake so it could surprise you.
The table tilted. Or maybe I did. My grip tightened on the edge until the wood pressed a row of half-moons into my palm.
Tahlia set her elbow on the table and rested her cheek in her palm, watching me like I was a cat testing a closed door. “They were my mother’s,” she said, conversational as weather. “She always said jewelry shouldn’t outlive the body unless it learned to listen.”
Saige choked on a breath. Daniel finally looked alarmed. “Okay, what is—”
“Take the earrings off,” Tahlia told me, tilting her head toward my hoops. “Trade with me.”
“No,” I said, because my voice had to start somewhere.
“Come on,” Daniel tried to laugh. It came out wrong. “We’re not doing… this.”
Tahlia’s eyes slid to Jayla, then back to me. “Children learn by example,” she said softly. “You were teaching her to drink. Teach her to keep what’s hers.”
A shape moved in the periphery—the server with a tray, the shadow of another table’s laughter, the door opening, closing, the neon fizz outside beating its insect wings. The world spun on, indifferent.
“Where did you get them?” I asked, because that was the only question I could form in the language of normal.
“From where she left them,” Tahlia answered. “Before she disappeared.”
“Disappeared how?” Saige asked, voice trembling into a formality that made me want to take her hand.
Tahlia shrugged. “Into the mouth of something you’d pretend not to recognize if it approached you at noon.” She smiled again—gentle now, almost kind. “But you, Imani… I think you’d look it in the face.”
I closed the box. The velvet fought the final inch, then sealed with a sigh. I set it on the table, carefully, like a live thing.
“Keep it,” Tahlia said.
“I don’t want it.”
“That’s the thing about inheritance,” she replied. “Want is never part of the will.”
The server arrived with plates that smelled like decisions we hadn’t made. Jayla stared at her water, then at me, then at Tahlia, then back at me. She lifted the glass with both hands, sipping as if the act required witnesses. I nodded. Sip again, little one. Drink like you believe your body deserves relief.
Daniel pushed his food around, appetite a casualty. “Tahlia, what is wrong with you?”
She ignored him, studying the space where my pulse lived in my neck. “Do you wake thirsty, Imani?” she asked. “Not for water. For *sense.*”
Something in my chest curdled. I thought of the father at the table, the metronome fingers, the decree: *Not for girls who ain’t earned it.* I thought of how people wrap control in language that sounds like love. I thought of how thirst can make anyone obedient.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“I used to,” she said. “Then I learned to keep the things that heard me when I couldn’t speak.”
We made it through dinner because people survive far worse with silverware and napkins. On the way out, the neon stuttered, and for a second the sign spelled nothing at all. Outside, the heat had grown teeth. Daniel fumbled for his keys. Saige hugged Jayla like a shield. Tahlia stood very still, watching us like figures in a snow globe that someone else would shake.
“I’ll call you,” Daniel told her, which was a lie even his shoes could hear.
“No,” Tahlia said, stepping to me instead. She pressed the velvet box into my hand. Her fingers were colder now. “You keep it.”
“It isn’t mine,” I said.
She leaned in close enough that I smelled the faintest trace of eucalyptus. “Neither is your thirst,” she whispered. “But look how it owns you.”
The box felt heavy as a verdict. I swallowed. My throat burned like I’d been drinking coins.
We went home. That’s what the mind calls it when the scenery shifts to something you can name without flinching. Saige and Jayla came back to my place, because that’s what sisters do when the world tilts—they find a flatter surface together. I put Jayla to bed on the couch, the TV humming some late-night documentary about oceans that never run out of anything. Saige washed her face until her eyes shone raw.
“Is she dangerous?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “But not the way you think.”
We sat at my kitchen table. My own glass of water sat between us, sweating, faithful. I didn’t drink it. The velvet box rested beside it like a black hole—pulling light, pulling sense, pulling the part of me that believed stories end because we command them to.
“Open it,” Saige whispered.
“No.”
“Imani, please.”
I opened it.
The ears stared—not with eyes, but with the echo of everything they’d ever been asked to hear. I felt the room tilt again; I let it. Behind the hum of the refrigerator, behind the TV ocean, I thought I heard a voice: a woman, laughing, then gasping, then saying a name I almost recognized before the syllables tore themselves apart.
Saige pressed her knuckles to her mouth. “Why would she—”
“To prove she had something no one could take,” I said, and the words surprised me because they came out too certain.
We closed the box. I locked it in the junk drawer, a tiny coffin among rubber bands and batteries.
I lay in bed and the ceiling began its long, starless sermon. Sleep came like an uninvited guest, sitting on my chest, asking questions I couldn’t answer with my mouth open.
Somewhere between the first dream and the second, I was back at the table with the father, the little girl’s hands folded, my hand holding the glass like a dare. The metronome fingers tapped: one, two. One, two. The rhythm got inside me, and when I moved, it moved with me. I lifted the glass to the girl’s lips, and she drank without breaking eye contact, like drinking was a rebel act and I was her accomplice.
When I turned, the father wasn’t the father anymore. He was Daniel, smiling too big. Then he was Daniel’s empty passenger seat, Tasha’s lipstick on a napkin no one would claim. Then he was Tahlia, head tilted, a listening thing.
“You teach by drinking first,” she said, though her mouth didn’t move. That’s how they learn thirst has a cure.
I wanted to ask her what disappeared her mother. I wanted to ask if she’d cut those ears herself or if they’d fallen off the way some people lose parts of themselves on the way to becoming a myth. I wanted to ask why she’d chosen me.
Instead, I woke.
My room was blue with that specific hour before morning, when the house holds its breath and waits to see who you’ll be when the sun arrives. I was about to laugh at myself, to push the dream away with chores and coffee and the soft, bossy kindness of daylight.
Then I sat up.
The velvet box was on my nightstand.
I hadn’t put it there.
I didn’t move for a long time. The house waited with me. Finally, I reached out and lifted the lid with two fingers, like picking up a note that might explode.
Inside, the ears were gone.
Only the earrings remained, the gold hoops small enough to fit a promise through.
On the inside of the lid, someone had written four words in a neat, careful hand:
Teach her to drink.
I touched my earlobes. My hoops were missing.
In their place, a soft ache—like pierced skin remembering an old story. I didn’t run to the mirror. I didn’t scream. I listened.
The refrigerator hummed. The AC sighed. A car passed outside, a single tire singing over a loose manhole cover—one, two, one, two—someone else’s metronome slicing the night. Underneath it all, a tiny, perfect sound: water traveling through the walls, the pipes carrying relief room to room. I followed it to the kitchen, to the sink, to the glass waiting where I’d left it.
I filled it.
When Jayla padded in, hair in a halo of sleep, she climbed into a chair without words and looked at the glass like it was a story I’d promised to continue. I set it in front of her. Her fingers curled around it, small and sovereign.
“Is it okay?” she asked.
“It’s your right,” I said.
She drank. She closed her eyes like a prayer had been answered by physics, not permission. Saige came in, too, and the three of us watched the water level drop and the morning begin to understand itself.
Later, when I finally lifted my own glass, I caught a glint in the window’s reflection: tiny gold circles winking at me from my ears—the pair from the velvet box. They looked gentle. They looked like listening.
I thought of the father and his rules, of Daniel and his favorites, of Tasha who deserved better, of Tahlia and her gifts, of a mother who had disappeared into the mouth of something called power or hunger or grief and left behind the parts of herself that could still hear a daughter calling.
I took my first sip. It tasted like metal. Like coins. Like a debt, paid.
The house exhaled.
Jayla set her glass down empty and smiled with all the teeth she had.
“More?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Always,” I said, and refilled it, and refilled it, and didn’t stop until she pushed it away herself, fingers drumming a rhythm on the table that belonged to no one but her.
