from The People of Paper

They thought of nothing but flowers and frogs. And the times when they strayed, they quickly returned to dreams of carnations and dirt, or they ran into their lead houses and lowered the door. And when they were stranded deep in the fields, their feet steeped in mud, they bit their tongues until their minds went to bursts of pain and blood, scrambling thoughts into indecipherable throbs.

But there is more to El Monte than Frederico de la Fe and EMF. Not all is about gangs and a sad man who wets his bed. There is time and space for everything, to observe the thousands of tragedies of a single growing season. To watch the flower stalks burst through the soil, interweaving their roots with the neighboring plant, tangling their wires under the privacy of soil, tightly gripping, gradually pulling themselves to each other to feel the brush of leaves against their stems.

When the fertilizer is tossed and the sun beams down, the foliage wilts and the stems burn with an itch. The plant on the edge of the furrow cups the morning dew underneath its leaf and extends its arm to drip the moisture onto the scabs of bark of the neighboring plant. The bead of water falls and then a sudden flash of steel collapses the stalk, which is then tossed into a basket. Four weeks later the harvest is done and dirt is upturned by a tractor plow, exposing tightly braided roots still clutching each other.

-Salvador Plascencia

(On an unrelated note, the cat LOVES this book.)