This is the fourth story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. Read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here.

I’m part of the crew that takes care of the grass at our city’s airport. When I say that, people are surprised, because few associate an airport with grass. However, all airports have grass. It’s just that no one pays attention to it. After a successful landing, some passengers cross themselves, others applaud, others close their eyes, grateful. Who’s going to notice the grass on either side of the runway? The same thing happens before takeoff, as the plane builds up speed and we anxiously wait for the moment when it’ll raise its nose and lift off.

The grass at airports is unlike the grass in parks and yards, where it plays a secondary role. At airports, grass is the star, because there can be no bushes or trees, which attract birds, and no flowers either, because they attract too many bugs, which in turn attract more birds, and we already know the danger that birds can cause at an airport, as they can sneak their way into the turbines of aircraft engines. There are earthworms, grubs, and all kinds of insects that do thrive in the airport grass, but because it’s a flat surface, with no hiding places of any kind, birds tend to avoid it; besides, they’re frightened by the roar of the planes. You may ask, Why let this grass, which needs to be mowed regularly, grow at airports when it’d be easier to replace it with asphalt? It turns out that it helps to stabilize air currents, untangling knots and wind vectoring that, when formed a few feet above the ground, can pose one of the greatest dangers to landing planes.

When I was hired at the airport, the chief of staff was surprised that someone like me, a qualified gardener who had studied in France for three years and done his internship in Europe’s most important gardens, would be willing to tend the grass at an airport. I told him that I was fascinated by airplanes and that watching them take off and land overwhelmed me with excitement. Actually, I couldn’t care less about airplanes. On the other hand, airport grass has fascinated me since I was a little boy. I’ve always been fond of those perfectly delineated stretches of turf, which are far from the splendor of the grass on soccer fields and golf courses; this grass, I’d say, is in a state of waiting, without a precise vocation, a bit like the way I was during my adolescence and most of my youth, ignorant of my aptitudes and unsure of everything. I think I loved that grass because it seemed akin to my being.

So, when I accompanied my parents on a flight and it was time to take off, instead of looking at the buildings and streets that were receding as the plane gained altitude, I would turn my head so as not to lose the last trace of the runway we had just left, and when my parents asked me what I was looking at, I would tell them that I was looking at the airport grass, and that made them really sad. “Look at the city, at how big it is!” they scolded me. The ocean of streets and buildings that got smaller and smaller second by second didn’t speak to me, but I looked at it anyway just to make my parents happy.

I suppose my attachment to that grass was what made me want to study gardening in France and what caused me to be a student whom teachers found so strange, since I paid so little attention to trees, flowers, hedges, and shrubs, and concentrated instead on the quality, distribution, and length of the grass, things my teachers and fellow-students didn’t care about at all. In point of fact, in parks and gardens abundant in plants and flowers, the grass is nothing more than a backdrop. Only at airports, with no masters to serve and no adversaries to overcome, can it reach its fullest glory. Looking at it, you can appreciate the simple joy of being alive. Flowers are beautiful, and, precisely because of that, they are almost dead, because they’ve had to resort to beauty to survive, unlike grass, which obeys a straightforward impulse, the one that first made it emerge without any difficulty, just to enjoy the sun and the air.

By studying airport grass, I have come to understand that gardening is not, as many believe, about drawing out the most beautiful and seductive aspects of nature but about penetrating its innumerable dramas, those that manifest themselves unabashedly, even in the grass alongside an air terminal. There, the grassy tapestry, uniformly maintained, clearly reveals the struggles of those who fight for the small amount of food available. And, if you think that airplanes stay out of these battles, you are wrong. The gusts and eddies they produce at grass level are perfectly exploited by the combatants who position themselves in such a way that their enemies are forced to climb up to the tips of blades of grass, exposing themselves to the gusts of air, which scatter them in a thousand different directions. Doing this requires knowledge of when an aircraft is about to touch down, a knowledge that beetles, mosquitoes, wasps, scorpions, butterflies, and other airport-grass dwellers have mysteriously developed.

I got proof of this a few months ago, after the terrorist attacks that forced us to close the airport for three days. During that time, the gardening team continued working as usual, and that allowed me to observe a dramatic change in the life that takes shelter in the grass. Quite simply, there was no life. Everything came to a halt: hunting, fighting, mating. In a surprising and inexplicable way, as takeoffs and landings ceased, the feverish activity that airport grass hides under its seemingly peaceful surface came to a screeching halt.

The birds sensed their opportunity. No longer frightened by the roar of the engines, they pounced on the stunned and passive fauna and feasted upon them. When I saw the danger the grassy tapestry was in, I ran to the head of maintenance and begged him to put up some scarecrows, which might bring an end to the massacre. He looked at me as if I were crazy. Soon, however, the results of that slaughter became apparent. When flights resumed, the grass, without the nutriment it was used to getting from the insects’ secretions, began to decay. Fertilizers, fumigations, and the introduction of new grasses were of no use. The grassy mantle was dying, exposing the earth, and dust clouds began to sweep across the runways. These whirlwinds made it difficult for the planes to take off and land, and then the well-publicized tragedy occurred. The official explanation blames a pilot’s carelessness, but in truth the culprit was the huge dust storm that rose up in front of the jumbo jet as it was heading toward the runway, reducing visibility to a minimum.

My bosses fired me, afraid that I was going to denounce the airport authorities, who had done nothing despite having been warned about the seriousness of the problem. And that’s what I did, but no one believed me when I said that the grass, the insects, and the airplanes formed a precise and unforgiving ecosystem, and the few journalists who came to interview me stared at me in a way that reminded me of the look my parents would give me during takeoffs, when, instead of gazing spellbound at the sprawling city beneath the plane’s wings, I would turn my head to look one last time at the airport grass receding behind us. ♦

(Translated, from the Spanish, by Curtis Bauer.)

This is drawn from “The Shadow of the Mammoth.”