The birth of flowers
by Enrique Urbina
based on "Mahal," by Miguel Milló
Your father tried it with goats, ducks, mules, whales, pigs, cows, dogs, guinea pigs, pangolins, deer, and despite everyone's warnings, a chimpanzee. This one gave him the nose he has and that made you laugh so much as a baby. You have to understand that he did it because he loved us. He wanted us in the most direct sense. I wanted everything, and I was missing you.

Our hope was revived when he reached the stage of trying with marsupials. opossums always seemed like the ones who could save our world, but no. Almost, but no. We discovered that no one wants platypuses for a reason. The kangaroos even seemed to enjoy it. I wish it had been like that.

As options ran out and soon we would have to try with insects and mollusks, I decided to do what I hadn't until then: I gave him a flower to lift his spirits. An orchid.
Needless to say, it exceeded my expectations.
Did you know that orchids do not have pistils, the female sexual organ, or stamens, the male one, separated from themselves, like all other flowers? You didn't know. Their pollination has to be done by insects with a proboscis long enough to enter the column, in the middle of the stigmas, until they reach the ovaries and deposit the pollen there. Charles Darwin wrote a treatise on this, prophesying the existence of a moth that had not yet been discovered.

Everyone: your father's parents, mine, the doctors, the midwives, and even the priests of our religions witnessed your conception. I salivated a lot.
And then, the following spring, you. Without a navel, but with flowers.
Who was holding on? You to the earth or it to you? It took so long to
clean the blood off your skin, to remove the roots you had instead of hair.