The Seed

The rain clouds had parted and the small patch of earth was damp, emitting a scent that only some knew how to enjoy. Those close to the soil, with orange leaves in their ruffled hair and thoughts of worms and horned beasts. It was a smell they both relished, unlike anything they could find in clear glass bottles. It was not the smell of elegant women, nothing like men in dark suits and slick hair. Nothing like glass buildings or sterilized hospitals. It was a forgotten odor, like the medicinal pollens and balms that had been burned and stuffed into floorboards that swelled with age. It was earth, birth, death. It was change, decay and rebirth. They knew the smell, they sucked it into themselves. It was time.

The two young sisters slept with their windows open. Sleeping with the moon, awaking with the sun’s first kisses. Winter or summer, they dreamt with the elements, living with the constant changes.

After months of wetness, the clouds had parted, like they always eventually did.

It was time. A new season had come, taking its first look at the new world. It was ripe.

The girls gathered the few tools they needed: a shovel, the small yellow watering can, and a basket full of seeds. They entered the narrow yard overgrown with weeds, their eyes shaded by the thin brim of their pink and yellow floral bonnets. The sun warmed their pink cheeks and lips, urging them forward, giving them a bit of encouragement with its heat. They inhaled deeply, at the same time, each one listening closely to the sound of the breath beside her.

Without words, they moved together. Clearing weeds into a tall pile, turning earth with the wide shovel mouth, carving out shallow trenches. When the trenches were prepared, they each took a handful of seeds, scattering the seeds every few inches and then covering them with dark soil.

They worked for hours, planting chamomile and foxgloves, lettuce and sage. The girls looked into the sky and began gathering their tools, they could smell rain.

Big, giant drops of water came, fertilizing the soil and each newly planted seed. It was the Father, the tidal force of dominant energy coming to give the little bits of information what they needed. The girls watched from their tiny second-story window, watching as the skies opened and water poured. It was essential, it was right, it was the way.

When the last bit of moisture disappeared into the soil, they ventured back into the garden, checking every day for the first sprouts. Wide eyes marveled at the birth process. The seed was information, the soil was the womb, the rain the sperm, the sun the food. Each one worked together, seamlessly, a merging of forces that would give birth to something new. A new life. A new plant. A little bit of information, a seed. It needed all the right tools, all the elements.

All the little seeds that had stayed dormant for so long, just waiting. Maybe the moment would never have come. Would they have known, could they just have sat for years on the wooden shelf, never moving, always in the same form, the same little bit of information contained in a thin shell, unused, unchanging. Did it know? Did it want to grow? Was there consciousness in that little seed, or something that could only become consciousness given the right conditions.

That was what they both had been. A little bit of DNA, a little bit of information. Each one of them had needed the right conditions. The right elements had combined, creating two little girls. Each thing that grew and died, that took a breath and pulsed, it had all begun from a tiny seed of information. Something that could be, manifested potential without a present or a past, eternal design waiting for time to come and press it into service.

Genes

They walk as a small group down the barricaded street. They move as a tribe, three generations of faces that have mingled with sex to produce the new human painting. The eldest has white hair, but a piece of her face is reflected in her daughter, not overtly, but the resemblance moves like a soft whisper, landing like a delicate hand upon her flesh. The daughter is wearing a summer dress, her dark brown hair is swept up in a pony tail. Her youthful reflection trails after her own daughter, a three year old that is the perfect blend of genes. With one eye, I see her father, with the other, I see her mother. A completed fusion of male and female.
Three generations share their skin, share their genes, a slight dilution with every man that enters, painting what has been with his own new brush. The genes trail over generations, each copulation resulting in a new form, slightly different than the face that came before it, but still, harboring the same set of eyes.
I watch them walk past me, undeniably a family of blood. They have transported the face and ears for millennia. They are the carriers of a line. How long has their DNA been moving, slowly, winding its way through history like a patient snake, carrying everything it requires within its code.
My own face comes from an older generation. My grandmother’s eyes, I saw them in the old photo before it blew away in the wind. I remember her eyes. The eyes of me. Passed from my father, dominated in utero…I am the result. The blend that seems to have no visible trace. The photos look like strangers, I must have come only from her, from the power in her code.
And I watch them pass, the family of blood, of shared looks, of shared traits. They smile, they know me. I see their progression, the noses, the eyebrows. The miniature lineage of looks, walking before me like a strange sideshow.
Was I once a part of their line? Did we share a distant past, a distant source? I look at them now…can we trace our steps and find a beginning?
I watch them and my mind wanders. It moves to the seashore. It moves to a great ape. It watches the dilution of river water into an ocean. The source of what? Source…is this a word with any meaning?
I stand outside and ponder. The sun moves past a dark formation of clouds. The sundress does not look as inviting.
The child runs towards a small dog whose ears reach the asphalt. What quirk of nature designed an animal whose ears drag across the ground?
“Why are they so big?” I ask in childlike wonder.
“To fly,” the girl holding the leash responds.
I can accept that answer.
Nothing is beyond possibility.
Not when we have all the time in the world.

On The Brink

It is just a string that keeps her from going insane. An invisible thread that ties her to the one more firmly planted. The earth is ripe only when sleep drifts from the eyes of the weary, and she is not yet among those counted. There is concrete and tar, little else. To move in the warm contours of soil and brother sand that exist in brief dreams of almost forgotten rooms. Woolen rugs and tapered yellow candles. Tent flags? Crushed slivery leaves and stone bowls of water. This is concrete, hard and unmoving.
She stands at the corner, undecided about the direction, south, north, east…do they lead to the same place? The streets ahead are gray, slate and drab and littered with old sandwich wrappers and discarded paper cups. The mottoes drift away on the wind, forgotten like each burp and French fry. The gutters are a collage, a temporary museum to the unwitting Mexican artist. The dark roads are long, each one of them marked by sign postings and shiny buildings that reach to the heavens in false praise. Clouds disperse in the wake of their unmoving weight. They move slowly, without care, without emotion. Their form merely shifting for the oncoming force.
A sharp edge plays with the tension in her back. It applies the mute song of a 90 degree angle, talks the only way it can. She gazes in the four directions. A bus baring a thousand Asian immigrants passes, rustling her hair. Taxi cabs, one after the other pass. They are but passing colors and shapes. She sees them as unsentimental players and nothing more. They move and go on command, the drivers, their cars, the lights and roads and all those upon them. She swims with them, a sparkling fish in their school. She reacts with a grimace to the woman on a cell phone, presents a smile to the ranchero. Acting on impulses, she drifts like a kite caught in the clutches of a hurricane.
She walks the edge between realization and death. An elongated honking horn, the stretching music of a car in flight. It winds, finds itself in the coils of her intensities, pulsing with the cold movement of mechanical life. You are here, she hears in the distance. The cries of bats and ocean waves creep in, the screech of old brakes and country songs curl together like strands of DNA. Distortion like no other she has heard. Teetering, she allows the weight of the building to hold her.