The mandrake awakens when a puddle of sunlight sneaks through the earth.
And the earth? What kind of buried sun burns its tangled legs and its hands extended like veins, to bathe them in gold and
cover them in mud? What sleep paralysis melts its petals and eyelashes?
The air scrapes her as soon as it touches her.
She opens her eyes. Her flowers shrink and stamp themselves like kisses
on her face. Her head explodes in clusters coiled like curls of
carnelian. The mandrake wakes up crowned with fruits that smell of dream, of rage, of death, and knows that the light has made her
hallucinate without being consumed.
She takes a breath.
The man covers his ears, but the root has not opened its mouth. Silence
weaves like a blanket over Campo de Gibraltar.
Mandrake, they should never have uprooted you. They should have let you sleep.