Among Giant Leaves: Magical Realism

Leaves

A bright green caterpillar crawls onto my muddy toe, so I stop walking, to let it go across to where it's going. It has red spots along its back, surrounded by white. It takes a bit of something off my nail.

"What are we going to do about Atar letting Bortez taking our land?" I ask her, my thoughts returning to it as I stare down at it, unmoving, feeling the living thing leave my toe, be gone from me, never seen again.

We look up into the cobalt blue sky and see a kite with a long tail, flying in shapes that never existed before, whirring. It's a good thing we aren't dreaming. A sound like that would lead to scary visions.

A large bird flies like black lightening right over our heads, zooming down, shocking, its harsh air upon the ears swift and acrid.

We wonder if perhaps it might be raining inside the house. Where we are, everything is still drying from this morning. But the sky is rolling with slate gray clouds above the mountains. That's all I can see over the leaves, so gracefully shaped, the point at their ends curved off to the side, coming to a delicate point not so sharp it offends. Their bodies swelling in a mono-shape, down to the fecund dark ground.

We've trudged through these leaves growing fast and huge like this many times before. We noticed that, after we did, we were able to keep our donkey after it was in a fight with a dog. The dog deserved being thrown in the air like that. Our town became woven together again to make a lovely landscape. The cobbler lived when he would have died. The prophecies were right about the children.