Jeeze, Natalie. You could have this published. It's almost perfect. The tone is excellent: detached but with underlying feeling. It's what you would expect of the narrator. I love the very idea of this piece, something so simple but so important. Just the setting is excellent, let alone the actual story. I really liked this.

I can see the water bottle in my hand.


I hold it carelessly, my thumb making dents in its plastic hide as I roll it against my bare arm, feeling its coolness against my skin.

Five pairs of eyes watch its motion.

It’s hot. Dense sunlight creeps in from the single window. A strangling humidity settles on top of the heat. The low whinnying of mosquitoes and flies fills my ears, but I have no strength to wave them away.

The first, italicized line perhaps did not make the impression you intended for it. All it ended up doing was confusing me as to its tense and placement against the rest of the story. The description of the room and weather is great, we get a really good sense of how it is. We are later surprised that it is Nicaragua you're talking about, but it's better that way than to push that out more forcefully in the beginning.

“¿Como se dice ‘agua’ in inglés?” one kid pipes up.

“Water,” I croak.

“Wa-ter,” he repeats in wonder, and his classmates say it, too.

“Y ¿como se lo dice in coreano?” he adds.

“Mool,” I say.

They all laugh. English fills them with wonder. But Korean makes them laugh. I raise my water bottle to my mouth, letting the bottle rim moisten my cracked lips. The laughter stops. They’re watching the bottle again.

I really loved this exchange. Obviously it gives us a concrete idea of the setting, but also the introduction of untranslated Spanish or any other language is a really nice thing to add to a story like this, adding to the detached atmosphere and not force-feeding the meaning to the reader. Well done. The bolded part is an especially strong idea.

“Compartamos,” I tell them, but there’s no need to remind them to share. They pass around the bottle, taking sips from it slowly, eyes half-closed in ecstasy. I am reminded of the biblical Last Supper, the unsaid thrill of the sharing.

The last kid holds the empty bottle and hesitates.

“Quiero la botella,” he says blatantly, his eyes meeting mine.

He wants the bottle as a forever reminder of its contents. He doesn’t know the water tastes of chemical nothingness.

I nod, and all kids clamber up to me. Will I bring a bottle for all of them tomorrow? No? How about the day after that?

Good use of Last Supper imagery. It's also very interesting that the kid wants to keep the bottle, and something you did well to add.

Later, finding the bottle cap in my pocket, I think about the incident again. What was it about that bottle that appealed to the Nicaraguan kids? Was it the oddness of it, water coming in sealed packages? Was it because it smelled faintly of something they couldn’t have? Or did they want it simply because it was mine? Perhaps it was because the bottle was a gift, nothing more, and drinking from it an act of remembrance of the companionship formed in that sultry Nicaraguan classroom.


Back at home, I drink from a water bottle. The water is cool in my mouth, but the memories burn in my mind.

Very good final paragraph. Really intuitive. I liked the last line. It surprised me and made me smile. It may be a little too solid for the evanescent quality of the rest of the piece, but since it is set apart and in italics like the first line, I think it adds a little more impact without being too directly involved.

Really good job, here! I enjoyed this story a lot. Keep writing!

This is great.  Very nice job!

The only thing I'm not sure about is the humidity being "strangling".  Stultifying, stupefying, suffocating, maybe a few other words that start with an s and end with an -ing, but not "strangling".

I can't offer a critique as there was nothing I would change and much I can learn from.  This was wonderful, a refreshing moment in the deluge of words.  I have been to Guatemala where live is much the same - you captured its essence so well.  Thank you for sharing it.

I'd critique if I had any criticism to offer, but I loved it!

Thank you for your intimate portrait. I think it puts out a question my wife has been asking lately: Why don't I do MORE?

The piece is written beautifully.

Whether the kids want the bottle as a token or as a piece of you is irrelevant to me. What I am considering es lo misma que mi novia: Por que no hache mas?

Gracias por tus palabras buenas.

 Oh, how you bring back memories of Peace Corps experiences in upcountry Liberia -- the language may not have been Spanish, but the feeling was the same.  Just today I read a Yahoo article called "Top Six Myths About Bottled Water."  Interesting, and you might want to look it up.  We live in Mexico, and have a water machine that makes potable water from the atmosphere -- a dehumidifier combined with several purification filters and a UV light.