GARDENS
Word Count: 348
He holds the tomato he’s just picked. He is amazed by its warmth before he realizes it has absorbed the sun. And realizes he is thinking of her breasts and how he misses the weight of them, the soft warmth of them, in his hands. He quickly puts the tomato in the bag alongside the yellow squash and single cucumber. He gave up on the string beans; it hurt his back to hunch down over them and flip through leaves to find them. He didn’t like them well enough to bother yet still he felt a crack squeak in his soul, knowing what she’d think of that.
Well next year there likely wouldn’t be a garden. Maybe he’d put in a couple of tomato plants in pots and set them in the sun out on the porch. He’d read about that somewhere, container gardening he thought they called it. When he’d suggested it she spat it out like milk gone bad. No self-respecting farmer would restrain tomatoes in a pot, she’d said. He laughed. Her and her gardens.
Just in the month that she’d been gone the weeds have overtaken the flowers in the beds around the house. He tried while she’d been in the hospital. He didn’t know the weeds from plants. Everything was blooming. He’d wondered about her choices until his neighbor pointed out the Goldenrod, the sourgrass, the Queen Anne’s Lace as it spread into the lawn. The poison ivy he found out about himself.
Why she spent so much time and effort on all this stuff, he’d never know. It seems an awful waste of time to him. He figures in the fall he’ll spread some grass seed. Easier to simply mow and buy his vegetables at the grocery; what normal people do.
He slices the one lone cucumber and wonders why it has no seeds. He steams the squash as he’s had it with dinner every night. He picks up the tomato and the knife, holds it hovering above and cannot bring himself to slice it. Barely sees it through his tears.
“He slices the one lone cucumber and wonders why it has no seeds.” perhaps i’m looking for more depth than there is. perhaps this is just a garden, or perhaps it’s much more, like a garden. tweeted this as #storysunday cuz it did make my sunday better!
It’s funny, Marcus, but I also read my stuff later and find depth to it that I’d love to say I skillfully wrote into it. The cucumber here, if I chose to “close read” the story, could be the rather obvious metaphor as a penis, and the “seedless” could indeed mean the lack of children. His slicing it could be taken as with the death of his wife, he loses the opportunity, or perhaps he’s wondering if the future brings that fulfillment.
Someday when I’m old and my arthritic hands can no longer type out stories, I’ll close read all my work and find out where my head was at.