All the Crooked Saints

by Maggie Stiefvater

Sometimes, Francisco thought that people might be roses. It was not that he disbelieved Darwin and the classification of the species. It was only that every time he carefully applied the pollen, he thought about the process, how the pollen would work its way over the rose’s stigma and then enter the egg cell and fertilize the egg nucleus, and how wondrous and strange it was that it was the same process by which we were made. Many of his days, particularly in these slow summer months, were spent engrossed in thought clouds triggered by small actions, and he lost weeks to thinking about what it might mean that so many creatures under the sun, from roses to birds to trees to sharks, came to life by the same, complex process. Even those whose process often looked quite different from the outside—like the meiosis, or cell splitting, of the sea urchin—still used much of the same raw stuff: cells, fertilizations, sharing of chromosomes. He mused on why it might be that evolution had not instead designed most of the world to share the simple asexual process sometimes used by plants such as pelargonium, a flower known commonly as storksbill. A cutting was taken from the original plant, dropped into moist soil, and left to make another plant. By the same process, to create Beatriz, he would have merely planted one of his fingers and she would have emerged later, fully formed and independent.