Quemado, Texas
Analicia Sotelo
My grandfather vanished into the land of the yellow jackets, swerving in their upper kingdoms. The land of the rattlers, ensconced in the cool of a wide, flat rock. The dry land, where the grass is laden with a hungry hue and the mesquites know their time to burn is coming. My grandfather's outline is at the welding station. The butterflies, in cream and marigold, accost the air with a sentient beauty. The boots he wore harbor spiders in the living room. And his red paisley bandana, cured with sweat, calls the river line to attention. Today is a rare day. I have finally had the courage to tell him what the sky said to me all those years ago. That I am bound to its bloodline, though I can never know its true body. That I am, in essence, a peacock. Neither native nor foreign, just an iridescence doing what nature demands. "What a bunch of baloney," I hear him say with his signature humor, like a splash of grenadine, as the sun pours its gold silt throughout the valley.
twenty minutes in the backyard
Alberto Rios
The house sparrow flies to the ground to get the seed that has fallen from the feeder. In doing so, it flies through a bit of spiderweb which works as something like a phone call. To the spider, who then answers with a "hello", careful and very quiet, but nobody is there. This happens a lot to spiders. It makes them grumble about the neighbors who walk across the spider's curious lawn. But the complaint is hollow--sometimes someone is indeed there, a fly, a moth, any number and manner of very small beast. They try to run away but are tripped up by the long, thin fingers of the web. The small thing quivers, asks politely, "please", to be let go, followed by a sincere apology. But a spider does not have ears. This explains why it does not hear the house sparrow swoop up into the air, high enough to reach the spider. Few leaves rustle, while the whole world simply moves forward. This is the Saturday business of the immense backyard conglomerate at work. If one listens, one might hear the great, bustling city of it all, the small sirens and screams, the caterpillars backing up, the geckos at their mysterious work.