Third Year Part 2

The first sign that life in District One had changed did not come from an engineer, a minister, or a government report.

It came from an elderly woman standing alone in her kitchen.

Inside a modest brick house along Hawthorne Street, sixty-eight-year-old Margaret Collins stared at the newly installed brass faucet above her stone sink. The fixture gleamed beneath the morning light, looking almost too polished for the small kitchen around it.

For most of Margaret's life, every morning had begun in exactly the same way.

She woke before sunrise, dressed in the dark, and carried two wooden buckets nearly three hundred meters to the nearest public well. There, she waited behind dozens of other residents while the line slowly moved forward. During winter, the handles froze against her fingers. During summer, the road back became a tiring walk beneath the heat.

When she finally returned home, her shoulders and arms would already ache.