A Man Named Fool

© Daniel Verastiqui

The black fields of South Texas baked under the late summer sun.

A man named Fool watched the jagged, deformed hands scroll by from the backseat of a hired car, the tint on the windows giving the solar collectors a gloomy feel, even as they sparkled like fractal stalks of pure obsidian. None of it had existed in Fool’s day. He gone on countless runs with his abuela to the massive cornfields in the surrounding counties to steal a trunkful of corn. Now all that farmland was gone, replaced by one of the largest solar power collectives in the country, stretching all the way from El Paso to just a few miles west of Tedford proper.

All of this, Fool had learned from his driver, an older Indian man with dark brown skin and perfectly styled hair and beard of pure white. His name was Sijan, and he’d lived in South Texas all of his life. For the last few years, he’d been ferrying people back and forth between Tedford and El Paso in h...