Degrees

Degrees By Christopher Peruzzi

When things were still good with the air, water, soil, and oceans, Cassandra watched the news obsessively.  It was bad every day.  Little by little, each was another degree worse.  Degrees riddled her consciousness.  Was yesterday worse than today?  Yes, it was. The government’s corruption was a degree slimier today than yesterday... and yesterday was a degree worse than the day before that?  And so on, and so on, and so on.  It was like snowflakes slowly building to an avalanche.

         Degrees. 

         The air was fouler today than yesterday.  The water stunk more today than it did yesterday.  Today, it was unbearable.  So intimate her connection to the earth was that each day the earth suffered it felt like someone whittling off small slivers of flesh from her arm with an Exacto-knife.  Each sliver a degree.  Each day was death by a thousand cuts.

         Her one persistent memory fueled her anger and outrage like a nuclear fission reactor.  It burned and it glowed white-hot, searing other innocent memories around it.  It was about the orange man.  Everything about him was a lie.  He, with his orange skin and golden hair, was so phony and artificial. She sincerely believed that if someone sliced his body open a viscous, rotten, orange-Fluffernutter ooze or rancid cheese whiz would flow from of him instead of blood.

         This specific memory lived in Greenland.

Cassandra remembered the difference between Greenland and Iceland because Iceland was green and Greenland was full of ice.  It seemed stupid, but it worked.  The orange man went to buy it.  He wanted to buy the world’s eighth-largest landmass.  It was ridiculous.  And because he was such a swindling liar, no one in the media knew for sure if he was buying it for himself (unlikely) or as the leader of the free world. 

         As the media interviewed him, his words dripped like fetid treacle from his lips.  Not that they were good words, or intelligent words, or even real words, but he would say they were the best words.  Each was among his very limited two-hundred-word vocabulary which was often misspelled in tweets.  This limited vocabulary was part of his personal brand and each word left his lips like an epileptic doing ballet, making him sound like a four-year-old Tourette’s Syndrome patient with a speech impediment attempting a Shakespearian drama.

         The media’s interviews with the orange man from Greenland’s icy shore was part of an infotainment piece on how he had come from nothing and was now one of the greatest entrepreneurs who had ever lived.  And while the piece made great copy, none of the facts within it were even remotely true.

         The interviewer, a tabloid journalist popular with the conservatives, asked the orange man, "Why Greenland?"

         The orange man never really said anything of substance.  Words left his mouth.  People heard them.  The words were written down.  He droned on about a new project involving one of his properties.  He said it was a big beautiful deal.

Things like that annoyed Cassandra.  She had wondered how a deal could have ethereal beauty.  It was nonsense. 

The interview ended with his trademark attack on the "liberal media" and their "fake news".  The entire thing had all the orange man’s favorite buzz words as if it were a "best of" compilation.

         Cassandra knew there was no way he could have understood or considered the significance of Greenland.  That frustration drove her mad.  Anyone who knew anything about Greenland knew it had hidden reserves of oil and gas under the ice.  What most people did not realize was the area, itself, was a "canary in the coal mine" for global warming and climate change.  A man of higher learning, intelligence, and education might have considered the global ramifications of pillaging that land.  The orange man didn't have that kind of training.  He needed a degree in ecology. 

Degree: Something to prove intelligence.

         The ongoing rape of Greenland’s geological resources spelled disaster for the rest of the planet.  Temperatures rose and pestilence thrived.

         All Cassandra knew was that the orange man was making a fortune from the planet’s misery.

***

The apocalypse was not as terrible as most of the days that led up to it.

         The fires on the water burned to bring the toxins and oils into a beautiful greenish-purple stain most artists would kill to duplicate on a palette. Not that anyone but a mad man would wish to paint this dystopia.  Looking out over the dying land with its brittle weeds and pus yellow skies, Cassandra saw more beauty and serenity from the fifth circle of Hell.

         She crossed her field like she'd done countless times before.  There used to be birds.  Could she even remember a bluebird's song?  It was hard.  When she was in school her teachers said birds flew south for the winter.  That was when there were winters.

         Snowmen, ice sculptures, icicles, and even sleet were a thing of the past.  Those memories would probably die with her.  Snows, which came like clockwork every December, used to blanket the yard like a crisp clean bedsheet.  No child these days could imagine a snowman.  It was easier for them to imagine fire, smoke, or oil burning.  No one would dream of a "White Christmas".  They were not like the ones they used to know.

         Cassandra removed her surgical gas mask.  How bad was the air? She wondered.  With some trepidation, she inhaled the toxic air.  It singed her nostrils with a dry chemical burning sting.  She hacked out an almost relentless series of coughs and her eyes filled with tears.  They were not from the fumes.  Her heart was breaking.

         She reattached her mask and breathed in the filtered air.  She wiped her face clean with her sleeve and then began her ritual.

         North was for the Earth.  East was for the air.  South was for the fire.  West was for the water.  She closed her eyes and spread her arms apart to either side.  Then she turned her body clockwise. One. Two. Three. She circled to honor the directions.  Three hundred-and-sixty-degrees times three.

As she’d finished, she offered praise to the Goddess and God.  Then she broke down and cried openly.  "Oh Mother," she wept. "What have they done to you?"

         Purple lightning crackled across the sky.

         "I am so sorry," she sobbed. "It was too much for me. I couldn't stop them."

         She nostalgically remembered the first time she performed the ritual as a girl.  A blue morpho butterfly landed on her finger and settled there.  It was a special message from her ancestors.  The Monarch butterflies were dying out.  They dwindled more and more until one summer, like a decree from the Goddess herself, only the Blue Morphos would come.

         Was this omen for good or for ill?  It certainly had a strong flavor of foreboding.  Her slow descent into Hell now confirmed it. 

How horrible had things become?  An evil man had run the world into the ground.  After Greenland fell there was not enough ice to reflect the long light rays back into space.  The "Greenhouse Effect" went into overdrive.  The warm rising oceans flooded into freshwater reservoirs.  The water temperature rose thirty degrees.

         Food grew scarce as the warm temperatures led the world's natural pestilence into a breeding ground with no a cold season to kill the previous generation.  Diseases like the West Nile Virus, Zika, and malaria wreaked havoc upon the weak and elderly.  The laws made to prevent this very thing were destroyed by the orange man.  Each law designed to protect drinking water and the earth’s ozone layer were killed by the orange man in the name of profit.

         Towns fell, cities fell, then counties fell.   Population hubs crumbled as people fought each other for basic needs.

         What did the orange man do? 

He did what he did best.  He took his money and hid from the public.  He didn't care about the world.  As far as he was concerned, the world was in hospice.

         Cassandra's rage fell to abject despair.  Her emotions cascaded into a horrible catharsis that erupted from her in wails, screaming, and excessive sobbing.  She was still in her circle of power when she picked up a dead branch for a makeshift wand.  She traced a circle and scraped the air, drawing sparks, like a match scraping against an invisible flint.

         "Oh Mother," she growled.  "They shall suffer terribly."

         She focused her energy into the earth.  She was no longer a physical being in this form.  Her consciousness transformed into energy.  It met the Earth’s.  It was overwhelming.  She reeled from the pain, poison, and sickness thrown at her as toxic waste and pollution.  It burned her soul.

         This must be what it's like to have cancer, she thought. The patient gets poisoned for months at a time and then is expected to recover.

         As much as it hurt, she took that energy with her as she drew its infection like a pus-filled wound.  Toxic chemicals, waste, chemical sewage, and the crap that came from fracking – it all came with her.

         Cassandra’s spirit-self rejoined her physical body.  Raising her left arm high, like a conductor to a symphony, she began her summoning. The wand glowed.  A large section by the river bank trembled.  With her right arm, she gripped a ball of seeming nothingness like a mime about to begin an imaginary snowball fight. Fire, water, air, pollutants, and toxic waste exploded upward from the ground.  The sound echoed for miles.

         Cassandra saw the construct’s form in her mind.  Tons of white-green-brown sludge oozed up and joined cans, paper, flammable water, and discarded plastic to form a new type of toxic plasticine.

         The clay giant rose from the ground as it gathered colored glass beer bottles along with the aluminum and tin from countless beer and soda companies, combining them with other non-biodegradable materials. Black rubber tires from scores of trucks and cars flamed and smoked as they became part of the giant’s matrix. The unbreathable smoking stench made from a thousand billowing items burned with a yellow-green flame.

         The thing’s face formed in Cassandra’s mind.  It was distinctly female.

         The giant’s body rose from the hole, growing thousands of feet high, accumulating more and more contaminated ground.  When it stopped growing, it sat down before the wise woman.

         “My child,” it said with a rumble as loud as tectonic plates shifting.  “What would you have of me?”

         “Mother,” said Cassandra.  “I have brought you forth for justice.”

         “Justice?” It asked. “How can I bring justice?  The concept of justice is to bring fair and equal treatment to a guilty party.  For there to be justice, I would need to torture a mortal well past his natural lifespan.  How can there possibly be justice?”

         “Then what of vengeance?” she said. 

         “I am beyond such concepts,” it said.  “My wrath is greater than anything you can conceive.”  To make this point it stood and then stomped its foot onto the ground.  Everything shook.  Casually, it plodded toward an abandoned apartment building and with a casual flick of its granite-hard hand, it did more damage to it than any towering rubber-suited monster imagined by a Japanese movie producer.

         “But,” Cassandra said, her voice breaking. “You’re dying.  I felt it.”

         The toxic creature smiled a warm gentle smile made of glass, tin, and rock.  It laid down again near the witch and if it could have sighed, it would have.

         “I am not well,” it said.  “I shall recover.”

         “Will you?”

         “You know much about nature,” it said.  “But you do not understand the nature of planets.  My planetary brothers and sisters, light years and galaxies away, have ammonia atmospheres and things within their matrix could kill someone from this world in a nanosecond.  It will take me millions of years to bring me back to the ideal conditions that spawned humanity.  I shall not be the one who suffers.”

         “You won’t?”

         “No,” it said.  “It will be humanity that suffers.  Humanity has squandered my gifts of earth, air, and water.  It is not my concern if humanity ruins its own environment.  When all humanity has killed itself off, the insects may evolve.  They may make new homes and feed on whatever life and gifts I give them.”

         “Is there no hope for us?” Cassandra said.  “Is there anything I can do?”

         “There is one slim hope for you,” it said.  “Bringing me here was not it.  This was not the way.  You were using a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel.” 

         Before the living goddess went back to the crater to disperse her form, the great mother spoke to Cassandra in the wyrd ways she had spoken to Cassandra’s mother and her mother’s mother, and her mother before her.  When the conversation was over, Cassandra had her plan and a few precious gifts she’d use for it.  She went back to her home, gathered her weapons, and prepared for battle against her sworn enemy.

         Cassandra donned her midnight black cloak and slung a large backpack over her shoulder.  She then drew her wand like a paintbrush and traced a rectangle in the air.  A door materialized in the open air.

         It was connected to nothing.

         This was no door from an ancient eldritch mystic tale.  There were no ancient runes written upon it hinting elegant clever riddles for people to speak “friend” and enter.  Nor were there foreboding Lovecraftian knockers that spoke non-verbal warnings from dark and vengeful gods with intricately carved demonic figures upon it. 

The unusual thing about the door was how uncommonly ordinary it was. 

It was a door.  It was a flat, plain, wooden, brown door with a common brass knob that could have come from any hardware store.  You could practically smell the plywood.

         She turned the knob and opened it.

***

         Cassandra walked through the portal.  She felt a static charge and the ever-present threat of burning ozone whenever she played with the laws of time and space.  An observer, had there been one, would have only seen Cassandra exit a storeroom door.  If they looked closer, they'd have seen that the other side of the door led outside - which would have been impossible in a bunker several hundred feet underground.

         Everything around her smelled like the chemical antiseptic used in hospitals with the undercurrent tinge of biological waste beneath it.  It made Cassandra think of badly made Porta Potties. 

         Whoever cleaned this place wasn’t using tap water.  Despite that, the brightly lit hall was as clean as any hospital or any military building with the cheerful aura of a morgue.  There was no warmth here.  If the bunker could talk, it would say, "Go away. I don’t like you."

         Eventually, she found the room she was looking for.  Her antagonist drew her forth like a moth to a candle.  Like a shadow moving across a pillow, she silently walked onward.  The two armed guards positioned at the door posed no problem.  She cast a simple spell.  They'd sleep well tonight.

         The door to the sick room opened soundlessly and she entered with all of the fanfare of a librarian.  The former orange man - now a pale pink collection of flab, excrement, halitosis, and bad manners - lay on his bed wheezing.  Sophisticated medical devices beeped and blipped with the musical cadence of a video game.

         It was both easy and difficult to believe this skeletal apparition lying here was the leader of the free world.  Gone were his dentures, tan, and fake golden hair.

She walked closer to him.

         "Are you awake?" She said softly.  She almost added "Mister President" to that sentence, but she had decided long ago that his brand of leadership was anything but legitimate.  His power was a thinly veiled lie over a thriving undercoating of fascism.

         He stirred.

         "What are you doing here?" He croaked with a bit of irritation.

         “Is that something you really need to know?”

         “Yes,” he said angrily. “And I’d like to scream at my guards before I fire them and throw them out.”

         “I wouldn’t blame them too much,” Cassandra said with a smile that usually came with a large predatory fish and a bass fiddle theme song. “They wouldn’t have been able to stop me.”

         The orange man felt a cold shiver trickle down his spine as he stared at the woman.  She had no fear at all.  He didn’t like that.  Women that fought back had always annoyed him.  This one would be a problem.

         “What do you want?” The orange man said.  His eyes darted back and forth as if he were watching a high-speed tennis match.  This was the first time in an eternity he found himself alone and unguarded.

         Help would not come for him.

         It was plain to see the orange man was not well.  He did not know why.  Despite the fact he had a fictitious medical report stating he was as close to superhuman as any decathlon winning man his age and falsified weight and height could be, the universal truth was he’d dropped forty percent of his body weight at an unprecedented rate.  Where he once was technically obese – given his real size and weight – and sported more than a bit of paunch, his unexpected drop in body mass left him looking like a collection of chicken cutlets stored in an oversized human skin suit.

         He couldn’t keep food down.  His fast-food lifestyle of high fat, bad carbs, and animal proteins (made plump through hormone enhancement) had failed him.  Initially, all he’d gained was weight.  The excessive sweating came often with the frequent vomiting and loss of bladder control.

         What his body was crying for, more than anything else, was water.  Strike that, not just water – good water.  Five months ago, good water – natural water – grew scarce.  The entire process of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation had been corrupted.  When other chemicals bonded with the natural moisture and then mixed with the clouds, what came down was not fit for human consumption.  The desalinization plants (owned by the orange man) began to produce New Water™. 

New Water™, a wholly-owned company of the orange man’s, was born on the premise that if he couldn’t get water from the clouds, he could get it from other places – like people.  The orange man also reasoned that eventually money would not be worth anything.  Real demand and trade came from things people really needed.  Food, air, water, and shelter became high-valued commodities in a world where acid rain killed the farming industry and oxygen became more difficult to come by. 

New Water™ was the new currency.

         When the desalinization plants began to fail, the orange man fell back on one of his basic tenants in the production of New Water™.

“It is impossible to get blood from a stone; but you can get plenty of it from people.”

         New Water™ now came from anything a human body could secrete.  Blood, urine, plasma, bile… all could be distilled and recycled into New Water™. 

         All impurities could just be evaporated away at two-hundred-and- twelve degrees Fahrenheit.

Of course, in lieu of that, the orange man would happily take property, deeds, homes, cars, or anything that had natural value in exchange for his swill.  Desperate people gave everything they had for New Water™ just to stay alive.

         When the air turned toxic, it really killed his customer base.  People who stopped breathing weren’t good customers.  That didn’t stop the orange man, though.  A dead body had everything a live body had when it came to moisture – sometimes even more so as it broke down.  The orange man focused his resources on new cutting-edge dehydrator technologies that could suck every drop of moisture from a cadaver.  The freeze-dried remains were thrown into the orange man’s industrial furnaces used to power the dehydrators.

         The old cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation was replaced with a new one of evaporation, purification, and cremation.

         Waste not, want not was the orange man’s new credo.

         The orange man stored lakes of New Water™ in his warehouses.  Whatever tradeable resources that did not go to real estate or moisture went to acquire guns.  He knew the huddled masses would grow rebellious.  Trouble, along with death and taxes, was a certainty.  If a few of the rowdier poor acted up and one of his hired mercenaries had to “keep the peace”, he’d slap down the malcontents with a bullet to their head, throw their bodies into a dehydrator, and then toss their ashes into the toxic winds for good measure. 

         Murder in the first degree.

         It wasn’t that New Water™ tasted better.  It didn’t.  Despite all the distillation, purification, and processing, there was always a bit of flat-tasting flavor mixed in with the ghosts of pee-makers’ past within the processed liquid.  Also, every-so-often the hydration process would make a near-miss in the hydrogen-oxygen mix and get it wrong.  Sometimes it would produce gallons of hydrogen peroxide.  However, most of the stuff most of the time was water-ish.

At least this product wouldn’t go on fire like the crap in people’s faucets.

Fire with third-degree burns.

The manufactured crisis made by him and fought by him made him richer and more powerful.

Only…

Only he didn’t feel powerful.  Oh sure, people lived and died at his whim.  But physically, he was weaker than a newborn kitten.  Physically, he couldn’t get out of this bed.  Whatever malady killing the populace had sneakily crept into his immune system and started its dirty work.

         “What do I want?” Cassandra echoed.  She smiled her sweet smile again.  “It’s not what I want.  It’s what I can offer you.”

         “Offer me?” The orange man croaked.  “What can you offer me that I can’t just have taken from you?”

         “Let me show you.”

         Cassandra rolled one of the hospital feeding tables and laid down the bag she had slung to her side.  Like a stage magician, she took care to present everything openly.  This was theater.  Slowly, she opened the bag, revealing two large stainless-steel thermoses.  One had a black top and the other had a white one.  She reached into the bag again and pulled out two simple coolers.  They were the size of two small lunchboxes – one was white, and one was black.

         “There’s something you need to know,” she said with the air of a traveling salesman.

         “What do you –,” the orange man started.

         Cassandra held up one lone finger and shushed him.  “Don’t interrupt,” she said.  “I’m in the middle of my thing.”

         The orange man, who was not used to listening to anyone, stayed silent.  Whether this was due to some supernatural power or the witch’s personal power and showmanship was unknown – either way, the effect was the same.

         She cleared her throat.

         “As you are the CEO of New Water™, I figured you should get some customer feedback on your product.”

         The orange man writhed uncomfortably in his bed.  The gastric turmoil within his own body was getting progressively worse.  While his vanity would not allow him to wear an adult diaper in public, he reconsidered after his condition got worse and more unpredictable.  On a good day, his intestinal distress was limited to loud borborygmi, frequent and paint peeling flatulence, and extreme dry mouth.  Whatever made New Water™ “water” failed to quench his thirst, but it did work on his dry mouth at the cost of other gastric mishaps.  On a bad day, the orange man could add explosive “squirting” with uncontrollable and frequent urination.  He fired three of his nurses after his condition was leaked to the rest of the staff.

         Today was not a good day.

         The orange man squeezed out a micro-fart that threatened to be much more.

         “The truth is your product tastes terrible,” Cassandra stated flatly.  “I don’t know who’s in charge of your product’s quality control, but he isn’t very good at his job.”

         “They don’t have to like it,” the orange man’s voice hissed.  “They just have to drink it.”

         “Oh well, there is something to be said about the competition.”

         “Competition?” The orange man scoffed. “New Water™ is the only game in town.”

         “Is it now?” Cassandra looked around the room and spied two glass pitchers on a shelf.  She opened the black thermos and poured the liquid into one of the pitchers.  Fumes from the liquid mad her eyes water.

         “This,” she said. “is water from the faucet in my house.”

         She found a small pill cup and poured some of the liquid into it.  Then she lit a match and touched it to the liquid.  The water ignited with a blue-green flame.

         “We can’t drink this.”

         The orange man gave a coughing laugh followed by a fart that could have come from a bicycle horn.

         “Children and animals that drink this poison die from neural disruption and seizures.”  She threw the flaming water into a sink where it went out.

         She took the other pitcher and poured the clear liquid into it.  Then she opened the white cooler and scooped her hand into it, drawing a hand full of fresh ice cubes.  She dumped the ice cubes into the pitcher and drew a second handful, dumping it into the pitcher as well.

         She raised the pitcher and flourished it in front of the orange man.

         “Do you know what this is?” She asked. 

         The orange man stared at the pitcher, opening and closing his mouth like a halibut.

         “It’s the real deal,” she said.  Cassandra smiled a proud, wicked smile.  With the pitcher still in the air, she spun the bottom of it so that the water would swirl in the container.  The ice tinkled and clunked at the sides of the glass. A lone drop of condensation ran down the outside of the pitcher.

         “Ya know,” she said, adopting a folksier tone. “When I was a kid, my mother would take us down to a farm down in Cape May, New Jersey, every summer.”  Cassandra went to the shelf again and pulled down a tall drinking glass.  Her hand languidly reached for the pitcher again and poured some of the ice and water into the glass.

         She raised the glass as if she were about to make a toast and then she brought the glass to her lips.  The orange man’s eyes followed the glass like a magnet.  Cassandra drew a small sip from it.

         “Ah, that’s good,” she said with a long breath.  “Talking is thirsty work.”

         The orange man’s stomach gurgled.

         “As I was saying,” she said, working her tone as a professional. “We’d go down to this farm in Cape May and way in the back of the property there was a river.  Some would have called it a swimming hole, but rivers are a constant thing.  They always bring fresh water and there’s nothing stagnant about them.  I’ll never forget how cold it was – it was clear and cool.  I used to go numb after a good swim in it.”

         The orange man rolled his eyes.

         “Well, you really should know what I mean,” she said.  “Did you ever drink water like that?  Water that is so cold it snaps the taste buds alive with its sweetness.  I swear, I could just drink gallons of it as a kid and never feel bloated.  There is nothing quite like icy spring water untouched by anyone to make you feel good.”

         She took another sip, swirling the glass so the glass would tinkle against it.  It jangled like a musical instrument.  The sip turned into a large gulp.  She let some of the water dribble down her chin and it ran down her neck.  After she put the glass down, she wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

         The orange man swallowed a dry swallow.  To him, it felt like his throat were two flaps of flypaper stuck together and he had to peel them both apart.

         “Are you through boring me or you going to come to a point?”  He rasped impatiently.

         “Maybe you’re right,” she said.  “Maybe the story won’t make good ad copy.  After all, who can remember a time when you could drink directly from a river?”

         “It sounds disgusting,” the orange man said.  He, at one time, had the reputation of being a germaphobe.  This painful irony coming from a man who was currently shitting into a diaper was not lost on Cassandra.

         She looked at the man’s unnaturally pale and gaunt face. Not that she’d do anything about it.  The time for sympathy and compassion for him as a human being had passed.  Her business now was all that mattered.

         “This is your competition,” she said matter-of-factly.  “This water has everything to cool and refresh the most parched of throats.”

         “Bullshit,” the orange man wheezed.

         “I have a guy,” she said.  “He’s created a process to reverse the poisonous effects of water from fracking.”

         She took another small pill cup and poured some of the ice water into it.

         “The process turns that flammable poison into this.”  She gave him the pill cup full of water.  She was careful not to touch him.

         He sipped from the cup slowly.

         The effect on the orange man was immediate.  Like a man who had been eating nothing but white rice and crackers for three years and then was given a shrimp cocktail, the assault on his taste buds could not be ignored.  The water was clean, pure, and full-bodied.  It instantly rehydrated his gums and dried tongue.  This water tasted like… well, like water.  There was no tinge of urine in it or bitter aftertaste.  The water was cool and sweet and refreshing.  The flavor and sensation touched a part of his soul that he didn’t know was dying.

         However, as wonderful as the taste was, it vanished in his mouth like breath on a mirror.  The swallow was done, and it left the orange man longing for more of that clean refreshing taste of real water.

         “It tastes like the real thing,” he said.

         Despite using his best poker face – one that had taken him the better part of his life through the shiftiest of deals to master, his mask was cracked through his wild desperate eyes.  It was one thing to keep his pupils from dilating, it was quite another thing to hide his fevered desire for this simple liquid and how it made him feel.

         “You wouldn’t believe how elegantly simple it was to make,” she said.

         “I’d like some more.”

         Not even a “please” or “thank you” – she noted.

         “Perhaps after we’ve had our talk,” she said.

         “What’s to talk about?” He spoke with his wheeling and dealing voice that he was known for.  “You’ve got a product to sell.  I’m interested.”

         “Are you really?” Rage crept into her voice like a poisonous spider. “You weren’t interested in this when you were warned countless times about how fracking contaminated our drinking water.  You weren’t interested especially when you did everything in your power to ruin the delicate balance between humanity and ecology.  Now, despite all the warnings that you spun as fake news, water, air, and earth have been raped to the point where people cannot drink, breathe, or farm the land.”

         The orange man was passionately disinterested.  She might as well have been speaking a dead language.  His face was a picture of boredom.  All his interest focused on the water and how he could profit from it.  He knew if people were desperate enough to fork over everything they had for the New Water™ sludge, they’d happily pull out their own eye teeth for this sweet liquid ambrosia.

         “How much do you want for it?”  He said.

         “How much are you willing to pay?”  She parried.

         “Name your price.”

         “What I want is beyond money.”

         “Nothing is beyond money.”

         “This. Is.”

         “What?” He said incredulously.

         “This, period, is, period,” Cassandra said with a voice full of cold steel.

         The orange man screwed up his face.  He was in unfamiliar territory.  Throughout his life, he had promised vast amounts of money to unsuspecting marks.  He usually got what he wanted without paying them.  Throwing money at this woman would not work.

         “Fine,” he said. “I’ll offer you fifty percent of all profits from your water.”

         “No,” she said.  “No money.  Plus, you can’t be trusted.”

         “What then?”

         Cassandra picked up the glass of water again and tinkled the ice against the glass.  She took another sip of water. 

“Give me your land.”

         The orange man swallowed.  His throat had already dried.  He was getting thirsty again.

         “All of it?” he hissed.

         “And more.”

         “Let’s pretend that I’ll give you the land,” he said.  “What else do you want?”

         “The ‘else’ is everything else.”

         “I want everything you have, and you will give it to me.”

         “Fat chance,” growled the orange man.  He was getting agitated which was not what he wanted – not on a bad day like this, anyway.  Anger, for someone in his condition, was like pulling the pin from a gastrointestinal hand grenade and leaving it to go off at a cocktail party.  His stomach gurgled loudly.

         “Was that you?” Cassandra said, stifling a laugh.

         “I’m not well,” he said.

         “Perhaps you could use a drink?”

         “I don’t drink,” he glared at her. “Drinking is for losers.”

         “Of water,” she clarified.  The orange man reputation of being a teetotaler in his public life was well known.  His system was delicate and it could not tolerate toxins.

         The orange man’s eyes lit up with delight and anticipation.  He was going to drink more of that cool refreshing water.  He felt so much better from the small sample she’d given him.  He just knew that if he had more of it he could recover from whatever was killing him. 

All I have to do now was get her on board, he thought.  I’ll cheat her out of everything as soon as I get the process. 

         Cassandra drew four ice cubes from the black cooler and plopped them into a large glass.  With the pitcher, she poured water into it. The ice cubes cracked in the water and the cubes split into smaller pieces which tinkled and clunked against the sides of the glass like an underwater xylophone.

         “If we go into business, will you be handling the distribution as well as you did with New Water™?” she asked.  She continued to swirl the water in the glass before giving it to the orange man. “I’d like to know the water is going to where it needs to go.”

         “Of course,” he said with enough confidence to make a halo large enough to block his horns.  “You can rely on that.”

         “Good,” she said and handed him the glass. “Then we can toast to this.  We’ll work out the details later.”

         Raising her glass for a toast, she saw that the orange man almost began drinking before they agreed to their deal. 

         The orange man stopped and remembered that toasts were important.  Some people wanted a handshake; some wanted a signature; she wanted a toast. 

If she wants a toast, I’ll give her a toast, he thought slyly. I can fake sincerity.

         “To business,” she said, raising her glass.

         “To business,” said the orange man, raising his.

         The orange man drank from his glass greedily.  He took a long sip that turned into a large gulp.  The cold from the ice numbed everything in his mouth.  It had been a long time since he’d had something that cold.  His dental work had always made the nerves in his gums ache from liquids that were too cold.  This time he didn’t care.  He only wanted the water.

         “You know that wasn’t a real toast,” said Cassandra.  “A real toast is made when you clink the glasses hard enough to catch a bit of each other’s drink into their glasses.”

         The orange man was not amused, nor was he interested in such trivia.  However, in the spirit of conning Cassandra for her water process, he feigned interest.

         “I’m not a drinker,” he said.  “I really don’t know a lot about these things.”

         “There’s a lot of history behind traditions like it,” she said.  “It all goes back to feudal times when no one trusted anyone.”

         “Really?” the orange man said as he took another swig from his glass.  This time he let a small ice cube go back to his rear molars.  He chewed on it.

         “Oh yes,” she said. “Handshakes came because a man offered his sword arm for the deal.  The handshake came later to ensure there weren’t any weapons up the other man’s sleeve.”

         “Do tell,” he said.  The orange man crunched on another ice cube and swallowed the slush.

         “Toasts go back much further,” she said.  “It goes back to the fear of poisoning.  You know that’s in the Bible?  Leviticus has it mistranslated as ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’.  That got a lot of my people executed.”

         “I think I remember something about that,” the orange man lied.  He had made a big show about his spiritual life by saying he’d read the Bible.  In truth, he hadn’t.  He knew nothing of scripture.

         “The real translation was ‘Thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to live’,” said Cassandra.  “Poisoning was quite common back in the day.”

         The orange man drank more of the water in his glass.  Most of the ice had melted in the water and he wanted to savor as much as he could.  “When will I get the process?”

         “Soon enough,” she said.  “My guy will meet with your people.”

         “Good,” he said.  The sooner I get it, the sooner I can own this planet.  New Water™ will be toilet water compared to this.

         “What you really should know is that a good poisoner is like a magician,” she went on.  “A good poisoner uses a lot of flourishing, some theatre, and a bit of distraction to get the job done.  Lucrecia Borgia had a trick ring that would dump the poison into a man’s drink.  Others would freeze some in ice and mix it in so slowly the victim would never notice.”

         The orange man’s face fell.  Cassandra smiled sweetly.

         “You poisoned me?”

         “Technically, it isn’t poison,” she said.  “You said to everyone that the stuff coming out of our faucets wasn’t poison.  It’s that.”

         The orange man’s face froze as he felt the toxins seize his system as his vision blurred.

         “The thing is,” she said.  “The real thing is that most people can withstand some contaminated drinking water, but a compromised immune system like yours probably won’t.  The ice probably numbed your mouth enough for it.”

         When the poison took hold of the orange man it started with his tongue.  The dry mouth pulled his lips together and his throat got very tight. 

         “Help me,” he gasped.

         “I could help you,” she said.  “All you’d need is some of this water – my water.”

         “I’ll give you everything.”

         “No doubt you would,” she said.  “But there’s nothing you have that I want.”

         “Name what you want.”

         “I want my planet back,” she said sternly. “I want a blue sky.  I want rain that doesn’t burn.  I want to breathe the fresh air again.  And I want fresh water from the sky.”

         “Please save me,” he pleaded.  “I want your water.  I want water.”

         Cassandra stared at the orange man coldly.  She thought of the millions of people that lost their lives or their loved ones to the orange man’s businesses and profiteering.  She swirled her glass again letting the ice clink, clunk, and tinkle musically against it.

         “I want water,” he repeated.

         She raised her glass in front of him.  Without saying a word, she brought the glass to her lips and took one gulp for herself.  Then she drew the glass to her mouth one last time and filled her cheeks.  

And then she spat all of it into his face.

         The orange man wiped his face with his bedsheet and screamed, “I WANT WATER! I WANT WATER!”

         Cassandra turned from him, dropped the glass onto the floor where it shattered into a million pieces and walked into the hall.  She could still hear the orange man screaming from his sickbed as she walked into the portal and disappeared.