Deserts: A Guernica Special Issue
To make a story from the desert is not unlike the work of the agave. Something must transform. The post Deserts: A <em>Guernica</em> Special Issue appeared first on Guernica.
Illustration: Jia Sung. My six-year-old is perched on the rungs of a ladder in the backyard, a grin on his face, one loose tooth. His hair is glowing, just like cactus spines do in the golden desert light. He’s helping my dad to unfurl the yellow tongue of a tape measure. For weeks, they have been carefully documenting the death of an octopus agave.
One day, the agave shot up a pink stalk, which grew at the remarkable rate of six inches each day until it was fourteen feet tall. It transformed then, burst open into thousands of yellow flowers. The agave blooms just once in its entire life—up to a decade for the octopus agave, and longer for other types—and then it promptly dies. But the process is simultaneously death and
