It's night. The tub people are happy because they have found their son, Tikrit Boujalay. But the joy does not last long. The boy is surrounded by a group of armed border guards who have pulled the enormous-bellied boy to the edge of their campfire. One is poking at Tikrit’s stomach with the barrel of his Kalashnikov making it slosh and jiggle. The others are laughing. The boy’s small face is abraded and bruised from being pulled across the night-hot desert scree. Sand sticks to fresh sores.

           Tikrit’s parents, terrified, hide together several yards away in the darkness, powerless to help their only son. They watch as the captain of the guard arrives and orders Tikrit to lift his cotton robe and piss on the fire. At first, Tikrit refuses, ashamed to expose his body in front of these men. The captain of the guard orders two of his larger men to pull Tikrit’s robe up and over his abdomen. The rest of the guards move well away from the fire.

           Tikrit’s mother Boulware rises from hiding and rushes toward the group from her concealed spot in the hollow of a dune but her husband grabs her and pulls her back into hiding. He pats her reassuringly and puts a finger to his lips, requesting her silence.

           The captain of the guard moves away from the campfire as Tikrit nervously begins to urinate in the sand at the fire’s edge.

           “Push him towards the flames!” the captain barks and the two guards reluctantly comply, turning their faces away from the fire and flinching. Tikrit’s stream becomes a steady gush and the liquid begins to sizzle in the fire. The flames at the edge begin to sputter and smoke. Finally, after an unbroken, two-minute piss, the fire is completely out and, to much laughter from his men, the captain of the guard rolls Tikrit to the top of a high dune and pushes him off. The boy tumbles down into the darkness on the other side.

…

           Tikrit Boujalay is an eleventh generation Vessel. He is a perfect specimen of an evolutionary oddity that enables his people to be bodily porters of great deals of liquid – causing them centuries of incredible pain and hardship. The little boy had gone missing late last night. He, his mother and his three sisters were smuggling oil across the border just south of a brightly lit checkpoint. Between the four of them, they had almost an entire barrel of crude sloshing around in their bloated, distended bodies. They moved silently across the dunes, half dragging, half riding on the hydraulics of their engorged bellies, leaving wide track marks in the sand behind them, as if enormous snakes or huge lizard tails had slithered across the shimmering night desert.

           Boulware was leading her tubby flock, duck-style, towards a prearranged rendezvous point where two men – their smuggling master and Boulware’s husband – were waiting near the border fence. As the mother turned to face her children and regroup them for the difficult, bloated wiggle through the chain link and concertino wire, she noticed that Tikrit had disappeared into the dark.

           Boulware stopped her three girls and turned them around to face her. “We must find your brother before we cross the wire or we will never see him again.”

           “How will we find him in the dunes at night?” Bertha, the oldest daughter asked.

           “We cannot call him. Voices carry in the night and a patrol will come looking for smugglers. You must use your hands to feel for your brother, then, bring him here to the wire. We will all cross together.”

           “Where will we find you?” Barcelona, the middle daughter asked without a hint of fear in her voice. The children had known dangerous night crossings longer than anything else in their short lives.

           “I am moving to the border to find your father. I will bring him back and together we will bring Tikrit and the rest of this family across.” With that, Boulware wrapped herself in her flowing black robe and disappeared amongst ribbons of razor wire that appeared dark silver against the black sky and gray sand.

           The three girls began rolling back across the dunes, using their legs, shortened by their grotesquely globular bodies, much like a turtle uses flippers to push the dome of its shell across sandy terrain. Their tiny hands probed, like ant antennae, seeking out the cotton robes and squishy body of their brother.

…

           At night, an intense heat came from below, a delayed mirror reflection of the daytime waves that descended from a bleak, dust-bronzed sky. Tikrit fell behind the four Boujalay females but was not worried. He’d made so many desert crossings in the dark of night that being alone and under the skein of stars was comforting to him. He also knew that his father lay ahead somewhere near the border, waiting for him.

           Tikrit was technically only a half-Vessel (they did not like to be called “tub people”) as his father did not carry the genes necessary for the mutation (the ability to store dozens of gallons of liquid in an evolutionarily modified bladder that was almost infinitely expandable, compressible organs, and a body that required little water to function for days in the desert heat). When the boy was seven he was, as is customary, temporarily taken from his parents and brought to an unlicensed “doctor” who implanted a flexible plastic tube through the boy’s abdomen at the top of his mutant organ to allow it to be filled with any fluid substance without poisoning Tikrit. Vessels have a series of tissues in their esophagi that much like the gills of a fish, push oxygen into the bloodstream. Once the “fill tube” is installed, they can drink water orally and have other liquids put in through their “fill spouts,” bypassing their ingestion systems without it affecting their organs and tissues.

           Tikrit began to think of seeing his father’s face when he was grabbed by the ankles and torn facedown and backwards across the heat-glazed sand by two uniformed border guards. They yelled at him and hit him with truncheons as they tugged him roughly across the sand. The blows did little damage to his engorged body, but his face was burned and bleeding from the friction of being scoured across hot grains and randomly interspersed rocks and the half buried, shredded metal remnants of almost constant war. Brown and white grains of sand peppered the wetness that already wept from fresh abrasions that showed pink beneath his dark skin.

           The guards rolled Tikrit into a circle of harsh metallic light created by a ring of halogen spotlights mounted atop the border checkpoint. The captain, having been alerted by radio from the patrol, was waiting for him. The men surrounded the small round body as the lights cast a cross of four shadows from the center of each figure, each anchored at the base of a pair of black leather boots. They rolled the bleeding boy over to face the captain who addressed Tikrit.

           “We have no tolerance for smugglers. You will be examined and tested for any traces of alcohol, crude oil or other illicit substances. If you are carrying any of these in that fat bubble of flesh, you will be executed immediately and what is left of your disgusting sack of a body will be burned. Do you understand?”

…

           When the price of crude oil began approaching $1000 a barrel on the international market, the unregulated movement of the viscous fluid across Middle Eastern borders began to increase at an incredibly rapid rate.

           When oil ministers and border guards first discovered that Vessels were being used as smuggler’s “tubs,” a harsh backlash meant that any Vessel crossing a border was subject to interrogation and horrible mutilations as bellies were stabbed and slashed with bayonets to empty their liquid contents. This proved to be impractical as the rapidly released liquid tended to rush out as if from a hose and incapacitate the stabber, spilling gallons of precious contraband in the process.

           The border guards came up with new and more interestingly brutal ways to detect the smuggling of crude oil by Vessels. The most popular method soon became forced urination (because of the incredible pressure put upon a full Vessel’s urethra, this was not a difficult undertaking) onto large fires. If the Vessel was carrying crude oil in his or her enormous bladder it would be immediately discovered in a horrible denouement of sizzling genitals followed by the explosion of a giant screaming human blister.

           The small group of seven uniformed men dug a large pit in the sand and filled it with a large bag of charcoal briquettes, piling old tires, wooden palates and other combustibles on top of it. One of the men produced a flare and ignited the pile that began to smolder, adding heat to the already oppressive desert air. Tikrit closed his eyes and tried to control his breathing. If even a drop of the raw crude leaked from his freakishly large second bladder, the stream would ignite the pile and his genitals would be painfully burned in the horrible moments before his inevitable death.

…

           After Tikrit harmlessly pissed on the fire, he was cast away into the night by the guard captain and left to contemplate his good fortune. They would not allow him safe passage across the border but he was free to return back across the desert from whence he had come. His father rushed out of the dark and gently rolled the boy back to his mother who was concealed in the darkness of a nearby bomb crater a couple hundred yards out of the bright orb of the checkpoint lights. Boulware gently patted her son’s head with a flipper of an arm, a common greeting between two bloated Vessels since any meaningful intimate gesture – hugging, kissing, cuddling – was physically impossible. Together, the three of them walked, sloshed and rolled back to the hole in the fence where they discovered the three girls still skidding across the sands nearby in a grid-pattern search for their brother. Had any of the Boujalay girls been caught by the patrol, they would have gone off like fleshy Molotov cocktails. For some reason, only Tikrit had inherited his father’s urological anatomy along with the parallel plumbing of his mother’s. Because of his two-bladder, double-ureter system, he was able to piss 100% pure urine on command, which required an incredible ability to hold a full bladder uncommon to most young boys his age. It also made him a smuggler’s dream vessel, able to carry any liquid: oil, water, nerve agents, alcoholic beverages, Coca Cola.

           “This must be our last trip for the children,” Boujalay quietly told her husband as the four young Vessels made their way through the tangled, serrated maze of the tunnel their father had cut for them through the border fence.

           “I know my love. I know.”

           Tikrit’s father looked into Boulware’s eyes, and at that very moment, both realized that they would be making this trip again soon enough, despite the danger to themselves and their children. It would be impossible not to continue to use their perfect vessel.

           Boulware sighed. She moved away from her husband and slid towards her son. Swiftly and decisively, she pulled a long dagger from beneath her robes and before her husband could react, she was at the small boy. With unbelievable dexterity, she maneuvered her ungainly body and was slashing the boy’s robe and slicing into his abdomen, just below his fill tube. He screamed in fear and pain as she slid the knife into his distended belly and while the thick brown-black liquid sprayed her, stinging her eyes and inflaming her mucous membranes, she slit her son’s belly upwards until she was in danger of damaging his vital organs. She then turned the knife sideways and cut out a four inch wide strip of the lining of his Vessel bladder, insuring that the container could never be properly stitched and whole again. She then plucked the blade from her son’s body and pulled him to her chest, sobbing as she comforted him.

           “I’m sorry Tikrit! I love you. It had to be done.”

           Mother and son embraced and sobbed as the sun appeared above the dunes and bathed their oil glistened skin in a flame-colored dawn light.