One night in Senegal

In a marsh in West Africa men in homemade canoes made from bamboo sticks bundled together with bristly twine made from a banana tree glide through, their voices mild and glottal. Now they are navigating a paddy, grasses four feet tall and brown with no life, hollow yet straight. A swarm of tzi tzi flies courses through the air, as though a solid container whose molecular bonds dissolved, angrily trying to reconstitute itself. A distant rumble of thunder, the horizon branches with ionically negative lightning. The distant sky glowspurple. The monsoon must be inundating, but here the air is thick like a towel that must be wrung. The crickets sing, and if sound were light a satellite would see patches of the earth alight in quick and random succession, dancing to a tune that only the one who controlled the crickets knew