Discuss Melchor's use of sensory details and vivid imagery within the final passages of Chapter I.

Melchor creates a vivid and disturbing picture of the boys' discovery in the canal. She achieves this effect by relying heavily on the use of sensory details to paint the portrait of the Witch's corpse floating in the canal. Melchor also uses a long sentence in order to build the momentum toward the revelation. She then adds that, "all five of them, surrounded by blowflies, finally recognized what was peeping out from the yellow foam on the water's surface: the rotten face of a corpse floating among the rushes and the plastic bags swept in from the road on the breeze, the dark mask seething under a myriad of black snakes, smiling" (7).