Assistant Editor Chelsea Whitton: This juicy work of microfiction feels like the perfect tale to tell in the dark, with a flashlight under your chin. It takes the earnest associations we tend to make with gardening—tranquility, domesticity, the impulse to nurture—and drives them to bloodthirsty, romantic distraction. I love the ramping tension between the serene tenderness of the narrator’s tone and the cruel, surreal clarity of the imagery.
To hear Allison read her story, click below:
Garden
I never had children but over the years my garden became like one and isn’t it trite to say so? I cradle seedlings with soft earth, feed them water and sun and rotting vegetables until they are grown, and then, just like children, I chop off their heads and eat them. One spring I was preparing the beds: putting down fresh compost, churning it and loosening the soil. I stripped off my clothes and sat down in the bed. I shuffled my legs into the richness of it and felt a tingle and then an itch. I moved them deeper and scooped handfuls of earth over the mountains of my knees, the slopes of my thighs, till I felt knives and needles through them. The veins wriggled beneath my skin, surfaced one by one, in bright splashes of red and long pink noodles. They tunneled out of my legs and wriggled into the soil. A soft rain began to fall. It smelled like heaven. I shuffled my legs deeper again, and earthworms rose up. They twisted with the veins so that no one could have told which was which—I couldn’t, and certainly not you—and then hundreds of them nosed through the dirt until they found the holes in my legs, like mouths agape. They squirmed into the holes, and it felt like knives and needles, then like itching and then a tight tingle, almost like sex. I stood up from the bed and hosed off my legs and bandaged them. I stumbled from blood loss, from the certainty that I would feed them again. The tomatoes were rich that year and sweet. Their juice was thick and dark like blood.
Allison Wyss‘s stories have recently appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Moon City Review, Yemassee, Lunch Ticket, Jellyfish Review, and (less recently) elsewhere. She’s hard at work on her first novel, which is about dismemberment, fairy tales, and other gross things, of course. Read more at www.allisonwyss.com
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