THE RAINS OF ANALAROA
When the rains come to Analaroa the rivers run red with the blood of the land. The hills lay naked as the back of the zebu with the ancient forests now gone, stripped by the foreigners who felled the rosewood and baobab and took them from the Madagascar island to their lands far off across the sea; torched like so much unwanted refuse by her own people, thinking they would farm the land when the steep hillsides would hold no farm, nor anything else, with the trees gone. The rains cut the lavaka into the naked hills as deep and ugly as an axe brought down hard upon the back of a zebu by one who does not know how to kill properly, but instead cuts and slashes until the animal falls in great pain, and there is nothing you can do with the hide or meat for all the destruction he has caused.
Mbolatiana Rabeson stood on the front porch of the clinic building, the concrete cool under her bare feet. She stared past the river and off into the hills, and the sight of their bareness, and the horrible lavaka which seemed to have no number to them, brought a heaviness to her heart. Plumes of blue smoke rose cold and alone from the floor of a distant valley, kiln fires burning the few trees remaining from the great forests, turning the precious wood to charcoal, then to be carted off for sale in far-off Antananarivo. Is there no end to their folly? she wondered and closed her eyes against the sadness inside her.
She took in a deep breath of the cool, morning air. She smelled no smoke but there was something else, a distant, sweet scent of rain. She turned her gaze east, away from the bare hills to the place where the sun now was rising and saw the clouds low on the horizon, the rising sun lighting them as if they were endless bands of golden silk. It had been two weeks since her arrival in Analaroa, yet this was the first time she had seen clouds. Soon the rains will come, she thought. And with the rains will come plague.
She left the porch and stepped into the room they had given her, small quarters just alongside the clinic’s examining room. The whitewashed walls stood bare, save for a single nail driven into the plaster above her bed, a metal ring holding two keys hanging from the nail. She climbed up upon her thin foam mattress, the metal slats on her bed groaning beneath her even though she was no heavier than half a man, reached up and took the keys in her hand, then knelt on the floor before the two large, wooden trunks, each marked Mbolatiana Rabeson, M.D., Analaroa. She unlocked first one then the other, and with both hands eased open their tops. Inside, all was as the American coordinators of Project Health Madagascar had prepared: needles and syringes, alcohol swabs for cleaning the skin, rubber-stopped glass tubes for collecting blood. Two boxes of protective masks. Forms to document participant consent for the clinical study she had been hired to help conduct; twenty-five copies, each translated into Malagasy and French, seeking permission to administer to her patients the medicine that might offer them their best chance of surviving if—when—plague visited their village.
And then there was the medicine itself, small boxes containing smaller vials of it within the trunk on her right. It was a simple antibiotic, familiar to her from her medical training in the States yet never tested in a formal way against plague. The Americans had said that there was good reason to think it would work well, likely better than anything else available to the Malagasies. Soon we will find out whether they are right, Tiana thought; very soon we will find out. The rain is coming, and with the rain the people will move their grain inside, and the rats will follow, and the fleas from the rats will find the villagers sleeping nearby. If there is plague in the rats, then the fleas will carry the bacteria to the people and there will be plague in the village. She sensed the unease rising inside her, something too small to call fear yet unsettling nonetheless.
And yet, if this was the first crystal of a growing fear she was feeling, a last look inside the trunks, the exquisite American order of it all, brought to her a sense of confidence, even courage. She closed and locked first one trunk then the other, then checked each lock with a quick, downward tug. She marveled at the beauty of them, the polished wood lacquered to highlight the natural grain, the brass locks shining and spotless. Tiana remained on her knees for a moment more, stroking the wood, feeling its varnished smoothness beneath her fingers. They are so beautiful, she thought, and the sight of her name written boldly on each of them brought to her a sense of pride and strength; strength enough, she hoped, to get her through another day.
Tiana rose up, unclipped her hair, ran her fingers through it, let it spill forward over her shoulders. She brushed out the knots that had gathered, first one side then the other. As she did so she thought of Eric, how he used to enjoy seeing her do this, how he would stand behind her, his strong, young surgeon’s hands on her shoulders, watching her in the mirrored door to her medicine cabinet as she glided the brush through her hair. It was her hair that first drew him to her, he had said—that, and her passion for public health, one that mirrored his own. The pure blackness of it, straight and soft; softer, he had said, than the hair of a kitten. The girls in the Minnesota town where he came from would die to have hair like that, he had said. Then he would pet her hair, smoothing it gently with one hand, then the other. She would watch him in the mirror as he did this, her head reaching no higher than the collarbones crossing the top of his broad chest, the gentleness of his blue eyes in his high-cheeked, finely chiseled face. Now she brushed her hair staring at the plain white wall; no mirror, no faces to look at—not Eric’s, not her own. Eric Anderson, just one more victim of personal passion and humanity’s folly, now less real than those distant columns of smoke vanishing into the sky above the naked and torn hills. Let there be plague, she thought. Let them come to me and I will cure them. Let it be so that there is no doctor in the entire American study who treats more plague patients. Above all, please God, let me be busy, too busy to think of anything, or anyone else.
And then she considered the potential consequences of this prayer for the people of this village, closed her eyes against the hurt of it, against the far larger ache growing in her heart. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, placed the brush down upon the rough wood of the handmade table standing alongside her bed, gathered her hair and clipped it. And now I do what I have done each day in the two weeks since I have arrived, she thought—wait. But with the scent of rain heavy in the air, she sensed that, finally, her days of waiting were nearing an end.
Lewis Schrager is a writer and medical researcher from North Bethesda, MD. He received his MA in Writing (fiction concentration) from Johns Hopkins University in 2023. He has published a dozen short stories in literary journals including South Carolina Review, Southwestern American Literature, South Dakota Review, Cottonwood, Bryant Literary Review, Colere, Quiddity, and Forge. His stories have been chosen for selected anthologies, including Stress City: A Book of Fiction by 51 DC Guys. In 1999 and 2001 his stories garnered runner-up awards from the F. Scott Fitzgerald writing contest. He has had three plays produced: Levy’s Ghost, (Baltimore, MD, 2005), Shadow of the Valley (St. Paul, MN, 2005) and Fourteen Days in July (Baltimore, 2014). His debut novel, The Radical Radiance of the Fishing Fly, will be released this fall. The work included here is an excerpt from his as-yet-unpublished novel, The Rains of Analaroa, a story of courage and survival during a plague outbreak in an isolated village in the distant highlands of Madagascar.