The Rivers That Fly

The bucket under the tap made a hollow sound now. A knock instead of a splash. Maya turned the handle all the way and got a cough of air, then a single brown drop that hung and fell and hit the plastic like a small dead thing.

Her aunt had explained it three times. There is a drought. The reservoirs are low. We take short showers and we do not waste. All true, and none of it answered the question Maya kept turning over with her tongue against her teeth.

Why here. Why now. It had not rained in São Paulo for weeks, and São Paulo was a city of concrete and heat and twenty million people, nowhere near a forest.

On the rooftop the tiles were warm through her socks. She had come up to feel the wind, because there was almost none, and the almost-none of it came from the northwest, dry and thin, smelling of dust and car exhaust. She held her hand up. The air moved past her fingers so slowly she had to close her eyes to feel it at all.

Inside her aunt's apartment, taped to the fridge, was a weather map from the newspaper. Maya had stared at it while the coffee brewed. A long pale arm of white had once reached across the whole country, from the green top corner where the Amazon was, down to the cities in the south. The arm was labeled with a phrase she had said out loud without meaning to. Rio voador. Flying river.

A river that flew. She had laughed, then stopped laughing.

Now, on the roof, she licked the back of her own hand and held it to the weak wind and felt the wet skin go cool where the air touched it. Her breath, when she breathed onto the tiles, left a small fog that vanished. Water leaving her. Water leaving everything, all the time, invisibly, upward.

She thought about the mango tree in the courtyard below, the only green thing for blocks, its leaves gone limp and dull. A single big tree, her science teacher had once said, could breathe out hundreds of liters of water in a day. Breathe it out through its leaves, into the air, where you could not see it.

Hundreds of liters. From one tree.

She looked northwest again, past the rooftops, past the brown haze, toward a place too far to see. She tried to make the number bigger. Not one tree. Not a courtyard. A forest the size of a continent. Billions of trees, each one exhaling, each one lifting water off its leaves into the sky, day after day after day, until the air over the forest grew so heavy with breath that it had to fall back down as rain, which soaked the roots, which fed the leaves, which breathed it up again.

The forest made its own rain. It drank its own clouds. It was raining on itself and had been for millions of years, a wet green engine turning and turning.

And the extra. The leftover breath, too much to hold. That was the pale arm on the map. That was the flying river, carrying the forest's exhaled water across the whole country, all the way down to a rooftop where a girl stood with a dry tap and a licked hand.

Maya's heart did something strange. Because a river that flies still comes from somewhere. And if the source thinned, if the trees at the far green corner were cut and burned so that fewer of them breathed, then the arm on the map would shrink. It would not reach so far. It would let go somewhere in the middle of the country and never arrive here at all.

The bucket downstairs was empty because a forest a thousand miles away was breathing a little less.

She pressed her wet hand flat and then remembered she was not supposed to lean on the low roof wall, so she pulled it back. She wanted to tell someone. She wanted to run down and pull her aunt to the fridge and put her finger on the pale arm and say, this, this is why, the water was always coming from the trees, we were drinking the forest's breath and we didn't know.

But she stayed a moment longer, because the sky was doing something.

Far to the northwest, low on the horizon, there was a smudge. Not gray like smog. White. A single small cloud, the first she had seen in days, sitting exactly where the flying river would come from if the flying river came.

Maya watched it. She could not tell yet if it was growing or dying. It sat there fat and bright at the edge of everything, made of water that had left some leaf she would never see, lifted by a breath she could not hear, sailing along a river with no banks toward a city that had forgotten it was thirsty for a forest.

She held her hand up into the thin wind again and waited for it to turn.

The wind did not turn. But the cloud, over the next slow minute, grew a second head beside the first, and then a third, the way a thing grows when something far away keeps feeding it.

Below her, in the courtyard, the mango tree lifted all its dull leaves at once as a gust finally came through, and every leaf turned its pale underside to the sky, and let go of what it had been holding.