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The Grocer's DaughterAmong the cabbages it happened, among the rampion and broccoli, the firm grapes dark as open eyes. It happened like leaves landing in a ditch; he looked, and she was there lumped beneath the tomatoes' blistered shadows, her little fists hard as walnut shells, mouth wide and screaming as a pomegranate spilled onto a plate - he saw and feared as one. Like any man, like any proper grocer, he knew the seasons like his sleeps, and the garden like his enemy. But not this, no not such things as mushroom girls sprouting from sweet compost - the blush of female flesh was strange to him; his trade lay in scales and cold cucumber skins. Yet, he knew as any grocer knows the cruelty of leaving cherries for blackbirds and spiders. So cursing his luck like a blighted crop he pulled her from the soil and swore to tend her like his persimmons - with one eye for spoilage, another for the market. A girl, even one found growing in a garden, he soon learned needs but a bit at first - sunlight, some air but more of protective shade, the better to spore in the rich nitrates he apportioned daily. But gradually as spring, her frail mouth burst with words; want, need, now and, the strangest, papa, each flowering sinside his tick veins new fruits he cannot prune, package or sell or even classify. It seems as though, he muses, all his stock had tumbled into him and left him full as any burgher after breakfast. The mushroom baby - almost a girl now - laughs in the bedroom, having grown too big for her patch of earth. His breath catches, and he wonders when it was that she became a daughter. He does not remember when the budding started, if it was in the garden weeding the sharp onion bed, or in the grocery, spray beading on the aubergines, the bright coin changing hands like prayers. Still, it does not really matter, he supposes, because his mushroom fingers still have strength and his mushroom skin is not so strange it scares the goodwives. If anything, his new closeness to the soil has taught him the kind of husbandry his ex-wife never saw, and a kind of gentle parentage. Now she bounces in his mycelial arms her impossible face turned upwards in a smile so wide he feels his being swell like a cornucopia and out spills strawberries and pineapples, cabbages and grapes darker than the earth. -JoSelle Vanderhooft |
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