On Wednesday, Teva took away the rain...

The people of Amra didn’t notice. They usually don’t notice much (they’re not very bright people), but this time, we can excuse them. They were busy that day preparing for the Feast of Sorrows. None of them knew why they celebrated the Feast of Sorrows, or why it was titled so, but they did know that every year at the feast, the first raindrops fell.

The Amrans loved the Feast of Sorrows. Children loved it because that was the day they ate lots of kilishi and played “Ali and Simbi” all night long. The youths eagerly anticipated it – the girls because they danced all night long, mercilessly teasing the young men, who loved the Feast for the games they would play, daring each other to steal the sashes tied around the waists of the dancing girls, until all had sashes, or dresses hanging free. Mothers loved the Feast because when they were not cooking or serving the food, they got together with old friends for lengthy and sometimes vicious “catching up”, and the men of the village loved it because great calabashes of kai-kai would be brought out for drinking. The revelry would go on all evening and into the night when the rains would start and all would scatter with glee.

This Wednesday started out like any other. Although the witch-doctor was unusually absent that morning, the air was filled with the yells of children as they managed to start a game while running errands for their mothers and the scent of smoke as the women started the first cooking fires of the day. Young women sat frantically planning how to set the knots of their sashes – tightly for those who wished to win, and loosely for those who wished for a different sort of prize altogether. The men of the village set off with high spirits to kill the beasts to be served that night, and simultaneously avoid their wives and mothers while doing so.
The cheeriness of the morning faded to sickly anxiety as the day passed in a blaze of heat, flies, and cloudless skies.