In the story thirst The great Irish writer Flann O’Brien describes how an empathetic appeal to urgent human needs can melt away state power. Two pub-goers are caught by a police officer at the bar well after curfew. In defense they invoke the terror that threatens with withering: “They marched and walked and crawled over one another and on top of one another: each man as dry as a brick, and the tongue in his withered mouth so swollen that it half choked him. And the thirst!!! My God, the thirst!!”