My knees always ache when it rains. It feels like thunderstorms down there.
Imbriferous skies quake and pour. In rows of misery below, black umbrellas and grim faces held in raincoat hoods move up and down the hill slopes. Impluvious bodies move as a current – up and then down, up and then down – carving new streams of black into the long grass.
Officers clothed in raincoats and trash bags tug at the leashes of baying bloodhounds, slipping in the mud.
I sit in the spindrift – the icy pinprick of the heavy rain turning my face raw. Splashes of mud freckle my pink cheeks. The rain flogs every black umbrella to a monotonous rhythm. Thunder rolls like a rock avalanche into a mountain creek. Corn stalks and men alike are bent beneath sheets of rain. Flashes of light across the sky smell like Sulphur. The earth a deafening drone, continuous, never-ending, and in that drone swept the black umbrellas and raincoats, one by one, two by two, shifting, streaming, flowing stern-faced and wretched. From the top of the hills they pour, pooling and spreading out into the fields like a black river.
A river of desperate life, searching for the dead.