Rebecca Entel
HOW TO DRINK ENOUGH WATER IN WARTIME

You have finally logged out from your social media because it was making you physically ill. With less scrolling, you’re not getting more done. You feel bad news from journalists or emails sent somehow across the ocean but from nowhere is about you. People ask you how you’re doing as if it’s about you. You fall ill with thinking anything’s about you. You only see bad news. You’re told the way to take care is with sleep, eight glasses a day, and putting down your phone. You’re told the world is getting more dangerous for you. Your grandmother finally seems right: you live not in the aftertimes but in the in-between-times. Still you walk from your car to your house at the same pace and turn the deadbolt with the certainty of the faithful. You have never considered yourself one of the faithful. You have never known a day without the magic of faucets or a roof that, even with storm-struck, flying limbs, will not hold. 

Rebecca Entel is the author of a novel, Fingerprints of Previous Owners; stories and essays in such journals as Guernica and Literary Hub; and flash in Jellyfish Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing, U.S. and Caribbean literature, and the literature of social justice at Cornell College, where she also directs the Center for the Literary Arts. She mentors in the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing program.

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