Three Stories of The Plague: Chapter I of When the Dogwood Blooms

The juvenile Texan got the window up just in time. A second later a wad of saliva the size of a piece of Spearmint spewed from the shepherd boy's lips, like a contemptuous curse, onto the glass. Akin to Jethro Tull's Aqualung dripping face, the spittle streaked down the window almost half a foot, traversing by gravity like one chromatographic line, or the singular trail of a despised, horned snail without a shell. Everyone else in the station wagon was seemingly oblivious to this gesture of contempt . . ." Soon after this a hunchbacked woman clad in a tattered wedding dress that dragged in the yellow dirt behind her reached the Texan family's car as it traversed through the gravel main street of the Peruvian Andes mining town.

So begins the first of the three related stories in Three Stories of the Plague. The second story is narrated by an M.D. in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, who has a sports betting habit and an undying love for his sister-in-law. The third is a tale about an artist from Boston and a another from Baltimore who met in a mining town high in the Rockies of Colorado.