The Day The Tap Runs Dry

had the inebriated feeling that I’d been asleep for a very long time ----- my body was stone stiff, like I hadn’t moved once through all the time either. My mind was dazed and slow; strange, colourful dreams --- dreams and nightmares --- swirled dizzily around the inside of my head. They were so vivid and difficult to diffract. The horrible and the heavenly, all mixed together in a bizarre jumble. There was a sharp impatience and fear, both part of the frustrating dream where your feet can’t move fast enough……. And there were plenty of monsters, red-eyed fiends that were all the more ghastly for their genteel civility. My ligaments and joints started to harden as the synovial fluids lessened. The dream was still strong ----- I could still remember every single detail. My body had frozen for a long, long time, as if I had signed up for cryogenics and the idea of waking up seemed pathetically abstractive.
“BRRIIINGGGG!!!!!” The boisterous ringing of my miniature alarm clock disturbed my reverie, tugging me back from my dreamland. It took me almost a millennium to wrench back my substantial eyelids and dispel the illusion as I was quite reluctant. I blinked my lead-heavy eyelids a dozen of times and rubbed them repetitively. “Oh, God!” I mouthed. Excessive mucus from my eyes had hardened into thick-yellowish fluids. My rubbing of my eyes had smeared the mucus all over my face. My pretty face! Instantaneously, I dashed into the bathroom and glanced into the mirror. What I saw there almost made me vomit out some stomach bile. “Hi, Dracula!” I greeted myself. I quickly wiped my face with a piece of fragrant wet tissue and a brand new look greeted me. “Ah!” I exhaled in satisfaction.  Suddenly, my subconscious mind came knocking. I had an inauspicious feeling. My six sense told me that something is going to turn very, very bad today. I shrugged off the feeling and continued on to brush my teeth.
Then the most unexpected incident greeted me. As I turned the tap 90 degrees, not even a solitary drop of water came out of the tap, let alone the familiar gushing of the water. I thought vaguely that  it was a hallucination so I turned the tap a few more times, sometimes turning it in the opposite direction, but all my trials were in vain. I sensed something amiss and a lump began to form at the pit of my stomach. I rushed into the kitchen and tried the tap there but I experienced the same thing. Precedently to the later moments, I was a blur, testing every tap in the house. At last, my worst fears were confirmed after I tested the last tap in my house (which was the tap by the pond) ----- today was the day the tap runs dry.
As today was Sunday, my parents and my sister were still sleeping like logs. I frantically ran into their room like a crazy madman, barely toppling the furniture arranged nicely in my parents’ bedroom. Then I literally shook their arms, almost dislocating their shoulder blades as I tried my best to pull them back from dreamland as my parents and my sister were sound sleepers. When they both started to protest groggily why I woke them up 2 hours earlier than usual, I hastily shushed them and informed them of the depressing news. The news made them wide awake straightaway and they both went into frenzy.  I smiled slightly at their endearing antics but my smile quickly evolved into a deep frown that seemed to be engraved into my forehead for perpetuity. I calmed my parents down and we all sat in the dining room and tried to think of how to cope with the grim problem.
“What should we do now?” my father enquired.
“Dunno. I really wish the water comes back --- my mouth stinks like mouse bile.” I pouted.
“Congrats, you’ve just won yourself the Best-Smelling-Mouth-Award. Woohoo!” my sister clapped and cheered in mock cheerfulness.
“Thank you, Miss Sunshine.” I mumbled, blushing at my sister’s sarcastic praise.
“Hey, guys, we must focus on how to solve the problem!” my mother commented lazily, apparently bored by our childish behaviours.
“Hey I think we should contact the PBA.” I was the first (and only) one to come up with a sensible and not quixotic answer.
So, we all contacted the PBA as planned. The Malay operator told us in a monotonous and droning voice that the water supply to our region had been cut off due to the major water pipe burst somewhere near our village. As the operator droned on, we managed to find out that the water pipe burst had ensued quite a flood to the surroundings and the workers had to cut off the water supply to our village to carry out maintenances to the major pipe burst. When my father enquired in his I-am-trying-to-be-patient-now tone about the water supply availability, the operator hesitated temporarily and squeaked out in a soft voice, “Maybe past midnight.” “Oh, man!” we all groaned excruciatingly as if we were being stabbed and my exasperated father killed the call.
Later that day, we all patronized the nearest food court to eat lunch (breakfast was skipped, obviously). To our utmost amazement, the food court was fully packed with people, mostly residents from this area. We had to wait tolerantly for around forty-five minutes until we finally got our lunch. We gobbled up the remnants of our lunch sullenly, the tantalizing food surprisingly tasteless. Even my favourite spaghetti tasted like a clump of mushy dung. We all were perceptibly in a morose mood as we left the food court in silence. Before returning home, my father dropped by a convenient shop and bought three bottles of 5 litres mineral water. My father told me that he was totally dumbfounded by the fact that these three bottles were the last ones in the convenient shop. During the normal days, the convenient shop is usually packed with thousands of this kind of bottles.  It seems like the water cut had taken its toll after all.
When we returned home, still sulking, we didn’t even bathe at all. We only dared to sacrifice a single bottle of our precious water to wipe our sweaty bodies with a piece of clean cloth. Our bodies still stank a little but at least the revolting stench had decreased by a large margin. During the hot and stuffy afternoon, I tried hard to concentrate in my revision but to no avail. The dehydration started to make me dizzy and the propinquity of my room suddenly intimidated me, as I closed my eyes tight. I have never been agoraphobic or claustrophobic before, but abruptly the whole room started to expand and contract simultaneously, squeezing my brain and agitating me. I felt like hyperventilating and suffering from hypoxia at the same time as my body disordered and the oxygen and carbon dioxide escaped with a ‘whoosh’ from my brain. I felt utterly disoriented and organized both at the same time as my eyes blanked and came back to focus repeatedly. All the thirst I endured today suddenly tripled and quadrupled and I felt like fainting. Then, as rapid as it came, the nauseous feeling left my head and everything cleared.
To my utmost relief, I was still in my study room, not whizzed off to another dimension and have little green guys wiping my bottom as I do my business. Or maybe having blue glutinous glue served as lunch. Interwoven with my relief, there was another feeling ----- gratitude. I started to understand the feelings of the citizens in the drought-threatened countries. They undergo this kind of suffering every day and night, whereas my family and I had suffered so agonizingly just during this short period of water cut. From that moment, I silently vowed in my petite heart that I would always appreciate the importance of water and will never waste a single drop of water for impractical aims.
Later that day, the sun sank down the faraway mountains, silhouetting it as light zephyrs billowed into my face, momentarily submerging me waves of pleasure. I was slouching luxuriously at the balcony, my thirst almost unbearable. Suddenly, a soft hissing sound entered my auditory canal and vibrated in my eardrum. I leaped up three feet into the air, my stomach churning in trepidation, briefly expecting a anaconda shooting up and confronting me (stop being quixotic, Steven, anacondas live in the Amazon! Not by your house). I immediately bashed away that thought and inspected more carefully. Wait, isn’t that the familiar gushing of water? I still remembered that I had left a tap open in the kitchen. Auspicious building in my chest, I dashed down the stairs and into the kitchen. There I saw a scene that almost froze my heartbeat. The kitchen tap was spluttering brownish rusty water copiously, making wonderful noises. Oh, how ecstatic I felt, how blissful! Thanks God, for relieving us from our misery. Immediately I rushed upstairs and broke the news to my parents. We were overjoyed! For the once and only time in my entire life, I dance joyfully along my exultant family.
That was the day the tap ran dry. Tormenting, but enlightening.