The Seven Ridiculous Journeys of Ambrose Dulliance (1)

Under a blue-backlit slate-grey sky smeared with clouds and sprinkled with scavengers, on the lower edge of town, a dirt road curling through flooded fields is visited by a few ramshackle houses, dark and squat in the light rain. One of them has an uneven plank nestling horizontally against one wall, balanced precariously on hollow sugarcane joists, awkward in the water. The twin occupants of the plank, a sad man and a heavy wooden box of badly mixed wet concrete, balance the ends. The man can be seen at this distance mostly as the hub of a busy cloud of mosquitoes. Closer, you see him glisten with drizzle and sweat. The mosquitoes congregate in his eyes and ears and clothes, drawing droplets of blood and mumbled curses. Champear, locals call it, this dogged flinging and perfunctory smoothing of trowelfuls of concrete against the brick side of a house to discourage intromittent rain. Well, Ambrose Dulliance has had enough of it for one day.

A woman emerges from the house, bringing refreshment. If he is a smeared exclamation mark in a shirt, she is a comely semicolon in tight slacks, and they look odd together, from a distance, converging like that over a glass of Coke. Nevertheless, they are married. It starts to rain more insistently. She hands him an umbrella and hurries back inside.