Free Borderlands by James Carlos Blake

riddles of life and death.
    The room was draped in shadows and pungent with the sooty smoke of kerosene lamps. The men drank and gestured and shook their heads. It had been such a meager little earthquake, they told each other. All of them had seen at least a half-dozen temblors worse than this one, quakes that left the village in piles of broken adobe and littered with tiles and thatch, that buried entire cornfields under mountain rocks, that ripped open the ground in a dozen places—and yet had killed no one. Then along comes a dwarf of an earthquake like this one, a weak sister of an earthquake that drops only a few big rocks in the field and opens only one big crack in the ground—and yet, just like that, it takes a man off the face of the earth. How, they asked, was a man to make sense of such a thing?
    For a time they drank in morose silence. And then Marchado Ruiz spoke up in a loud slurred voice. He said he only hoped they had not held the mass for Anastasio’s soul too soon.
    Heads turned his way. Marchado Ruiz was a fool and everyone knew it, but even from him such a remark could not be easily ignored. Eyes narrowed at him in question. Lips drew tight in anticipation of stupidity.
    “What I mean,” Marchado said, waving his cup for emphasis and spilling pulque on the men sitting beside him at the long table, “is that maybe Anastasio was not yet dead.”
    Now everyone in the room was staring hard at Marchado Ruiz. Faces clenched in anger and men muttered darkly. What was this fool saying to insult the dead?
    “I mean ,” Marchado said in the rising whine of one desperate to make himself understood, “that hole looks pretty damn deep, doesn’t it? I dropped a rock into it and never heard it hit the bottom. That’s deep , no? So, what I mean is, what if it’s so deep that Anastasio was still falling when the mass for his soul was said?”
    The room fell silent as a tomb.
    “The mass was supposed to be for a dead man, but if he was alive and still falling, the mass was too soon to do him any good, no? Now, maybe he died of fright as he fell, but I don’t think so, not a brave man like old Anastasio. Hey, for all we know, he’s still falling. It’s possible, no?” He looked around at his gaping audience. “I mean, that hole looks pretty damn deep to me.”
    Marchado Ruiz had never been able to tell a joke properly in his life. The only laughter he ever inspired was derisive and directed at his foolishness. But now somebody burst out laughing— truly laughing—and in a moment was joined by somebody else.
    And then suddenly everyone in the room was laughing—laughing hard, laughing with their teeth and eyes and belly, laughing with all their heart, roaring with laughter. They pounded the bar and tabletops with their fists and slapped each other on the back and howled with laughter. They bought drink upon drink for Marchado Ruiz and they put their fists to their faces and wept with laughter.
    All of them—even Benito and Lalo, who could not help themselves and would later pray for their father’s forgiveness—laughed and laughed until their bellies were in agony from laughing, until their fists were raw and sore and their jaws ached and their eyes were burning dryly, drained of all tears.
    And then every man of them got happily drunk—and later, singing loudly in the moonlight, they went staggering home to their women and their beds. And in the morning, as the sun once more ascended over the mountain peaks, they were back at their work in the sierra’s long shadow.

ALIENS IN THE GARDEN
     

    I
    There were, Julio thought, some clear advantages to working in the fields rather than in the groves. For one thing, you did not have to climb a ladder to pick tomatoes, so there was much less risk of breaking your bones. And a full basket of tomatoes did not weigh even half as much as a full box of oranges, a difference for which your back was grateful at the end of the day. And in the fields he had seen