Excerpt: Soul of a Woman, Flying

The signs had started. For the previous three evenings, a blood-red sun had emblazoned the earth with its heat and color. There had been no wind, no respite from the oppressive heat and humidity. Even the geckos and dragonflies hid themselves. Nothing stirred along the Colombian coast and inlet town of El Paraiso Perdido where Flora Echevarria spent weekdays living with her grandfather and attending her last year at the convent school and weekends caring for her mother at her mother’s house just outside of town. Flora stopped in the middle of the road to again dab her eyes. Suddenly, as if in answer to her prayers for rain, a breeze blew in from the Caribbean Sea. It lightly lifted her cotton skirt and deposited a gritty layer of sand and dirt against her damp skin. A long overdue storm surely was about to blow in. Flora wished she were sitting on the beach of black sand in nearby El Valle where blue butterflies flitted about and where she could have an unobstructed view of the squall line as it moved toward the Colombia coastline. How she long to escape the worry that had become a part of her every waking moment.
Flora set out again at a brisk pace, continuing along Avenida de la Esperanza toward La Botanica. What was the hour? She looked up to gauge the sun’s height against the horizon. In the distance, she saw a man approaching. He seemed oblivious to the massive reddish brown wall of dust that followed him.