Rachel Farrell’s work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Ninth Letter, the Offing, PANK, and Vestal Review. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and currently serves as the blog and social-media editor for Michigan Quarterly Review.
Water, I learned, was the most abundant element in nature whose only value came from controlled and measured distribution. Our lives invariably revolved around its input and output, and the same rules which governed the natural world were...