She imagines its coolness gliding down her throat. Wet with a lingering aftertaste of fish and mud. She imagines its deep voice resonating through her in primal notes; echoes from when the dinosaurs quenched their throats in the Triassic swamps.

Water is a shape shifter.

It changes yet stays the same, shifting its face with the climate. It wanders the earth like a gypsy, stealing from where it is needed and giving whimsically where it isn’t wanted.

Dizzy and shivering in the blistering heat, Hilda shuffles forward with the snaking line of people in the dusty square in front of University College where her mother used to teach. The sun beats down, crawling on her skin like an insect. She’s been standing for an hour in the queue for the public water tap.

The Way of Water

My short story, The Way of Water, which was recently reprinted in Metastellar Speculative Fiction and Beyond (rated the second most popular online sci-fi magazine), is now in The Best of Metastellar Year Two, an anthology of forty-eight stellar short stories previously published with Metastellar.

The Way of Water was first published as a bilingual print book by Mincione Edizioni (Rome) in Italian (La natura dell’acqua, translated by Fiorella Moscatello), and English along with a recounting of what inspired it: The Story of Water (La storia dell’acqua) in 2016. The Way of Water has been reprinted several times, in magazines and anthologies, since its first appearance in 2016.

I named the story “The Way of Water” (“La natura dell’acqua”), about a young woman (Hilda) in near-future Toronto who has run out of water credits for the public wTap; by this time houses no longer have potable water and their water taps have been cemented shut (as was done in Detroit in 2014); the only way to get water is through the public wTaps—at great cost. She’s standing two metres from water—in a line of people waiting to use the tap—and dying of thirst.

“The Way of Water” captures a vision that explores the nuances of corporate and government corruption and deceit together with global resource warfare. In this near-future, Canada is mined of all its water by thirsty Chinese and US multinationals—leaving nothing for the Canadians. Rain has not fallen on Canadian soil in years due to advances in geoengineering and weather manipulation that prevent rain clouds from going anywhere north of the Canada-US border. If you’re wondering if this is possible, it’s already happening in China and surrounding countries.

The Way of Water, in turn, inspired my recent dystopian novel A Diary in the Age of Water, which explores the lives of four generations of women and their relationship to water during a time of severe water restriction and calamitous climate change.

“The Way of Water evokes a sense of awareness about issues of access to water and about the dangers of imbalances in that access.”

Derek Newman-Stille, Speculating Canada

“In a short story in which every word has its weight, Nina Munteanu manages to describe a dystopia with ecological, political, social and economic elements and Hilda’s reactions to her situation with a great emotional intensituy. To avoid thirst, Hilda ends up embracing an extreme idea, a last hope linked to water. The Way of Water is a story of the kind you hope is science fiction but you fear is not.”

Massimo Luciani