Pa Ginger tills the ground, whistling. “Look at these glossy tomatoes!”
Stinking marigolds flourishing orange-yellow party petals bend and peer, scaring bugs away.
“They’re sturdy, too, Pa,” Ma Turnip answers, breeze twisting her wispy roots. “My best ripe girls, these heirloom tomatoes. Survived the ladybugs. It’s all I can do, not to boil and butter my own self, and feed me to my kids for fuel.”
Pa harvested his turnip wife when she was small and young—before turnips turn bitter.
Ma glances at the russet potatoes, muddy boys grown from tubular halves, their knobby eyes staring skyward.
“Raising these veggies takes a chunk out of me.” Ma waves her roots garden-ward. “Planting, preening, harvesting.”
Pa chuckles. “Me too.” He breaks lumps of his ginger self, submerges them in soil, to regenerate ginger roots.
Ma strokes Pa’s lumpy appendages. “Those rabbits last year, destroying our carrots, they nearly killed me. The carnage!”
“One field over, Farmer Booth’s raising prize racehorses now.” Something wild stamps the ground nearby.
“Fine run-off water, for us.”
They survey the garden—frilly lettuce, erect celery stalks, purple radishes. The dark earth, fetid with peelings, minerals, and worms, sprawls beneath horse manure.
Ma sighs. “I’m too old for this.” The spout of green leaves on her head flops forward under sunlight.
That night under full moon, Ma Turnip and Pa Ginger recline in the dry wheelbarrow. An orange-toothed nutria, swishing its whip-like tail, scurries down the hill, into the garden. The large rodent rips up plants with his thin arms, sucking plump tomatoes from stems, gorging.
Ma and Pa wake to messy dirt piles, damp with tears, withering. “Come on,” Ma says. “Get up. Or rot.” For a long time after, she’ll hear the tomatoes, pulpy red as blood, screaming in her sleep. Today though, the two of them break pieces of themselves, they nestle into the earth. They grow.
Nicole Brogdon is an Austin TX trauma therapist interested in strugglers and stories, with fiction in Vestal Review, Cleaver, Flash Frontier, Bending Genres, Bright Flash, SoFloPoJo, Cafe Irreal, 101Words, Centifictionist, etc. Best Microfiction 2024, and Smokelong Microfiction Finalist. Twitter NBrogdonWrites!
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