What the Wreckage Knows

The old woman laughs like something breaking. "You want to know what's funny?" she says. "The soil here smells like the soil back home. Manure is manure. The earth doesn't care which country shat on it."

The young one watches her hands—cracked, patient, moving through the dirt like they remember a different garden. "Did you think it would be different?"

"I thought I would be different." She pulls a weed, examines its roots. "I am the same person who left. Just further from the door."

Between them, the rows of vegetables do not care about borders. The tomatoes ripen in whatever language you speak to them. The beans climb toward light that has traveled eight minutes from a star that also doesn't know the word refugee.

"What keeps you going?" the young one asks.

The old woman's laugh again—glass and honey, jagged and warm. "The same thing that keeps the worms going. The work is here. The hands are here. What else should they do?"

She gestures at the field, the fog lifting, the silent endurance of green things pushing through.

"The world chews us up," she says. "But look—we are still spitting seeds."

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