The Garden behind the Moon

It didn’t rain all summer. Instead of water, my father used prayer for his garden. Despite his friends’ laughter, he planted spinach and lettuce, countless rows of cucumbers in beds lined up meticulously ignoring old people’s warnings about the drought. Every afternoon, he pushed his hat back, wiped off his sweat, and looked up at the empty sky, the sun scorching the acacia trees shriveling in the heat. In July, the ground looked like cement. Like the ruins of a Roman thermal bath, it kept the vestiges of a lost order, traces of streams long gone. He yelled at me to step back from the impeccable architecture of climbing green beans, the trellis for tomatoes, although there was nothing to be seen, no seedlings, no tendrils, not even weeds, just parched, bare ground— as if I were disturbing the hidden sleep of seeds.