As a go-to metaphor across genres and media, cleansing rain is instantly understandable: drenched by it, a world and its characters are made fresh and born anew. But what about a dark, filthy rain? The kind that occludes windows and darkens the street? That sticks to you like film? That churns up filth as it oozes endlessly from the sky? What does that rain signify?

This kind of rain is at the grimy heart of Rain Revolutions, a three-story collection by the Honduran writer and poet Bessie Flores Zaldívar. In each story, characters confront forces out of their control while fighting for what lives most truly within them — love for themselves, for others, and for their country.

In this uneasy book, each story indirectly informs on the others, revealing a picture of life in the hot and poor countries that global protagonists pretend are the periphery of global events. The stories are about trying — and usually failing, but sometimes briefly succeeding — to rise above history, fate, and even the uncaring turns of the weather.

Although there are many contenders for the title of nation most consistently and thoroughly fucked by the United States, Honduras is on the shortlist. The policy of the United States toward Central American nations has been characterized by a “what’s yours is ours” rapacity for centuries. When the governments of these nations fail to comply, the US deploys armed forces and spies to quash restive workers and in support of right-wing interests and their death squads.

None of Zaldívar’s stories are directly about the US military, corrupt local politicians, or banana magnates furious about paying their workers a decent salary. But all her characters live in the shadows, to one degree or the other.

Of the three excellent stories, the most overtly political is “By This Time Tomorrow,” in which demonstrators burn the US embassy to protest the illegal extradition of a drug lord (who, unlike the Americans, at least helped feed the poor). But the story’s central action is almost to the side. Two student revolutionaries have a complicated romantic history, which we see through a fractured narrative before and after the protest, and they must contend with their parents, who care more for the lives of their children than the corrupt and violent politics of Honduras. Although they try to figure out who they are with and without each other, almost none of this happens in dialogue. In this, Zaldívar is a master of precise gesture and unspoken looks, hard tricks to pull off in print.

In “United We Can,” Isaias, a banana worker and team leader on the floor and on the picket line, deals with a literal flood of sewage that results from an endless rain. In the first paragraph, Isaias and his extremely pregnant wife watch the dirty water rise:

They agree, unspokenly, to not worry until the water has reached the second wooden step. Tuesday at noon it isn’t quite there yet, but when the wind picks up and builds waves, some of the brown murky splatters fly all the way up to Isaias’s feet on the fifth — and final — wooden plank.

They have much to worry about. It’s 1954, and banana workers are striking for better pay and decent living conditions. The family is hungry. It won’t stop raining. They have almost no clean rags, and Isaias doesn’t know how he can make sure his wife’s upcoming labor is safe. In this tactile and hungry story, muck covers everything. Isaias’s travails have a stench to them; the reader feels and sees the filth-flooded street. The story grapples with sacrifice and what it means. We know, as readers with Google, that the strikers made some gains and held them briefly, and so meant more than nothing. But Isaias’s personal tragedies, which come with the force of the wind, are nothing to the powerful.

The least ostensibly political story, “Lluvia sin Agua,” takes place in 2019. Although there is no revolution and no strike, there is the constant and terrible feeling of living in a place that is broken and battered, wrecked from the outside and eaten away from within. To put it bluntly, the main character, a young mango-hawker named Evelyn, wants to fuck, but she and everyone around her stinks.

Evelyn lives in Tegucigalpa. There are massive water shortages, yet rain pours down, dark and terrible, every day. But this rain never falls in the right place. When the roads flood with dirty water, the trucks with clean water can’t get through. Water is everywhere, but there is barely none to drink, and nothing at all for bathing. As the title suggests, there is a flood, to be sure, but no water for anyone. It’s an irony that Coleridge might appreciate, but his parched sailors are doomed by supernatural machinations. The agony of Tegucigalpa is man-made. The rich take what they want and give drops to the chosen few. The rest suffer daily indignities.

Evelyn survives by balancing dignity and pride with desire and revulsion. In a taxi, a man’s cologne gives Evelyn “one of those headaches that feel like there’s a balloon behind her eyes that keeps inflating, its rubber skin turning thin and translucent, but never popping.” She calculates how much she’ll stink tomorrow and next week. Strange encounters, sweat and grime, pubic hair trimmed with a mango knife — all part of Evelyn’s story, which turns out to be the most joyful of the collection. It bursts with lust that can’t be stopped by the inequities of rain. Her life may always be miserable, and water might fall unevenly on the rich and the poor, but the poor, so long as they are still living, will fight the tide for a chance at some of life’s joys.

Powerful people — banana titans, dictators, opportunistic journalists, and members of Congress — don’t (usually) want to rob people of joy. They just don’t care. They sit in the clouds and chuck random lightning bolts. To them, Hondurans aren’t really people. But Zaldívar insists that they are. Rain, in Zaldívar’s collection, isn’t a metaphor for getting clean. Nor is it one for getting dirty. Disconcertingly, it isn’t a metaphor at all. It’s an inevitability, neither good nor bad. Somehow you just have to live in the face of its unrelenting drive.

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