Water Rope

Dad drowned in the concrete of the canal, his wrists wrapped with a reed rope braided for a widow from a neighboring village. I inherited his identity as a drain inspector, but found that the widow's daughter came to the drain every morning to burn paper—the bruises on her neck overlapped with the screams in the recording of my father's last phone call. When I hid her in the culvert, the flood alarm sounded, and villagers holding sickles stood downstream.