The next morning

She walked through the wet, quiet town with her head down and hood up.  Music pulsed in her ears, and the bird song went unnoticed.  Every step was gritty and the eddies of red dirt marked flaws in the road.  Warm, her hands, in fists, pushed through her pockets.  As she came over the rise, she saw the red lake.  There had been pictures online, but it really wasn't the color of blood.  The water was a deep, rusted orange, the result of so much of the suspended, iron-rich sediment.  Blood-red or not, the lake looked like Pharaoh's curse.  Stella kind of liked it.