As I promised, a couple of pieces from Malverde Days by Duke Miller.

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the flowers pine

I sat with juan, my gardener
We were talking about how flowers could love a person, how to gently prune them like you were removing a woman’s clothes
He was as old as Cervantes, rode a burro to my house every Thursday
He had no family, lived on the highway connecting the capital, where cars passed at one hundred miles per hour of complete indifference
Juan had shrapnel in his knees
He was shopping for rat poison when a bomb went off in front of a business being extorted by the gangs
As he got older the knee joints stiffened, he could hardly get up from the ground, the earth waiting for him, not a problem, but plants were another matter, almost no patience when it came to the growing, the nurturing
As we talked he told me he felt exhausted, his heart beating wild like birds overhead
He said there was nothing wrong with him, no fever, no stomach pain, no trouble breathing, nothing except he felt tired
We sat together for about an hour, discussing this and that, and then his eyes got heavy and he rolled over, passed out
I called a taxi, we went to the hospital
When we were trying to get him out of the car he came around and walked into the admitting room and promptly threw up a bucket of blood, but he didn’t die, that came later, when he climbed a cliff and jumped
Poor Juan had been depressed about his knees and how the government cheated him out of his measly pension
Juan lay at the bottom of the cliff for a year before they found him
Most of his body had leaked into the wet cracks along the stream bed and filtered down into the aquifer beneath Malverde
When I think of the water I wash my face with, I think of Juan, his knees and flowers in my garden who miss their lover

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Under Malverde Time

time is tricky here
January seems like Monday to me
February is Tuesday and so on
I went to Dr. Pablo for some answers
I was thinking it might be the weather or the food
He made a meta-diagnosis and wrote a prescription for 100 kg of nails and a carpenters hammer
He told me that I should start nailing down the days just after midnight
Hammer them squarely into the darkest part of the night as it spreads across your bedroom floor
The nails will slow things down considerably 
I said that sounded like a lot of work to me and couldn’t he write a prescription for a nail gun
He said sure, but he very much doubted if my insurance would cover it