[Download] "When the Rains Came: Winner of the 2009-10 Awp Intro Journals Project, Selected by Crystal Wilkinson (Fictional Work)" by Melissa Lambert * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: When the Rains Came: Winner of the 2009-10 Awp Intro Journals Project, Selected by Crystal Wilkinson (Fictional Work)
- Author : Melissa Lambert
- Release Date : January 01, 2011
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 74 KB
Description
It was hot the night before the storm, which is not a difficult thing to recall. It always got hot right before it rained: not the bone-warming heat of the dry season, but a damp, encompassing heat, thick as a teakettle's steam. When the air was hot like that--wavering right before our eyes--the buzzards would start to circle high in the piercing blue sky. We never knew if they were waiting for creatures to die from the heat or from the floods that were surely coming. Those buzzards could predict the rain better than any weatherman, and we knew that when the black shapes took wing, like dark angels, the rains would come soon after. That night, our mother came home as daylight was fading. She arrived tired from a long day cleaning an office building in the city, her face greenish from the artificial light of her hour-long bus ride home. She brought with her a bag of jabuticaba fruit that she had picked off a tree on her way home. The dark glossy fruits were slick in our palms, gelatinous in our mouths. We joked that they tasted like eyeballs, but we ate them greedily. As we passed the bag around, our mother stood in the little kitchen and made rice. She carved lines into the onion, left to right then top to bottom, and sliced off little cubes to fry with the rice in oil before she added the water.