While away at boarding school, a boy named Bishi is told that his brother Michael is dead. Upon learning the news, Bishi is unable to cry, even though he knows his classmates expect him to do so. He eventually summons tears by thinking about a memory of a white building with a red roof and a smokestack attached to it.

Bishi travels by bus to his home in Mutare. While waiting at a bus stop for a transfer, Bishi dozes off and dreams of the white building. It is a hospital he visited with his mother as a child. The smokestack belches out black pillars from the incinerators used to cremate the hospital’s dead. When he asks his mother if people die in the hospital, she grows uneasy. He hears a familiar sound in the trees and begins to cry.

Bishi wakes up with tears on his face as his transfer approaches. Just outside Mutare, there is a black pile of decaying animal flesh surrounded by vultures.

At his father’s farm, as his family comforts him, Bishi still cannot cry over Michael. That night in bed, Bishi hears the same sound in the trees that he heard at the hospital, both in his memory and in his dream.