The Plain in Flames by Juan Rulfo

Everything's going from bad to worse here. Last week my aunt Jacinta died, and on Saturday, after we had buried her and the sadness had begun to fade away, it started raining like crazy. This upset my father, since the entire barley harvest was drying in the rickyard. The downpour started suddenly, in great waves of water, giving us no time to stow even a handful; the only thing we could do, everyone who was at home at the time, was to huddle under the shed and watch as the cold water fell from the sky and burned the yellow barley we had just harvested.

And just yesterday, my sister Tacha's twelfth birthday, we found out that the cow my father had given her for her saint's day had been swept down the river.