One
61 days until the SPICE Pumpkin Weigh-off
Some parents keep their grown children’s bedrooms like shrines. Others bulldoze over nostalgia in favor of a home gym or craft room. Sadie Fox’s father, Stu, possessed neither the sentimentality nor the ambition for such behavior. Her childhood room stood mostly unchanged, with the exception of the floor space taken up by industry-grade steel shelving and grow lights.
Not for illicit purposes; for pumpkins.
Those pumpkin seedlings had long since been planted out back, where Sadie would be tending to them for the remainder of the growing season. She set her duffel down at the foot of the bed. Thankfully the shelves were outfitted with casters, and she could scoot them out the door and into Stu’s bedroom. She shared her bedroom with a loom back in Los Angeles, and she aimed to do the same here in Pea Blossom, Indiana.
While Sadie blossomed as a textile artist when she got to college, her childhood bedroom bore the telltale signs of a budding talent aspiring to be a properly tortured artist. A clumsy but carefully observed still life of a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bag of Skittles still hung over her bed. Stuck into the mirror of her childhood vanity, an old picture showed her and her father, both unsmiling and gimlet-eyed, stiffly flanking an outrageously large pumpkin at the Seasonal Produce of Indiana Celebration and Exposition, aka SPICE, Pumpkin Weigh-off. The faded Polaroid had the air of a Victorian mourning photograph in which stoic family members propped up a corpse. Technically, the pumpkin was a corpse, so perhaps the vibes were spot-on.
The picture startled a laugh out of Sadie, who wasn’t sure what to expect from the house she’d stayed away from for so long.
Another photograph wedged in the mirror, this one a moody self-portrait, scowled at her. Shadows cast by a strategically arranged venetian blind obscured her young, round face. So original, so much ennui. Sadie plucked the photo from the mirror and slid it into a drawer filled with expired black eyeliner pencils and tubes of vampy lipstick. She’d upgraded brands since then, but the color preferences stayed true.
She pulled the pumpkin Polaroid out and looked at it closely for a few seconds before putting it back in place. Stu would not be present for the weigh-off this year…and Sadie would attend for the first time in about two decades. Before she got the call from Stu asking her to come back to Pea Blossom, she would have assumed only a terminal diagnosis, the Grim Reaper’s scythe poised mere inches from his throat, could have kept him away. Instead, her uncle Fred’s golf cart accident was enough to pull her father out of the pumpkin patch and onto a plane to Boca Raton.
“Are you sure?” she’d asked him. The question had been too vague. It was both Are you sure you want to leave? and Are you sure you want me there?
“Of course I’m sure, Sadface. Fred is alone down there and he needs help. He’s family.”
That self-explanatory chestnut—he’s family—stuck in her craw. Stu asked for her help with his pumpkins in his absence, and he’s family. Her father. Shouldn’t that be the end of the story? If only it were that simple.
She’d asked for a week to think it over; he countered with an offer of three days. Neither Fred nor the pumpkins had time for dillydallying, as Stu called it, and three days was stretching it. The fact she didn’t instantly say no made her wonder what possible upsides she unconsciously sensed.
Maybe she could repair what was broken with her father, whom she barely spoke to. And maybe growing pumpkins, something she knew how to do, would give back the sense of herself she’d lost in her last commissioned textile project. A break from California might clear her mind to welcome
new ideas. She said yes within a day.
Seeing how Stu was willing to set aside his truest passion for his injured brother tugged something in Sadie’s heart. Who would make such a sacrifice for her? Could she forge something new with her father? She’d often wondered what it would feel like to have not just a father, but a dad.
Not that she’d call him by any other word than what she always had: Stu. Anything else would be far too weird.
Was she coming back to help her father and, by proxy, Fred? Maybe. But she was also coming back for that fierce girl in the photo. The girl who never fit in but had a taste for victory, who felt like a wizard’s apprentice in the pumpkin patch.
Practically no one in LA expressed any curiosity about her life in Indiana, and she hadn’t spent much time thinking about it herself. When her rideshare left the Indianapolis airport, passing miles of corn and more than one HELL IS REAL billboard, she began to worry that hell was in fact real and she had been duped into returning to it.
The main drag of Pea Blossom was as stiflingly small as she remembered. Her father’s farmhouse was as ramshackle as ever. There was no key under a doormat waiting for her, both because there was no doormat and because the door was always unlocked. But that old photo was the first good omen of the trip, making her think something good could come from some time with the pumpkins. She headed out back to check on them.
What the fuck.
Sadie puzzled over the mangled chunk of pumpkin nestled into overgrown grass mere steps from the back door. The pumpkins should have been right where Stu left them, growing in the sprawling patch behind the house she’d been raised in. Fucking deer. Farming along the edge of forested land came with mammalian hazards. She headed into the pumpkin patch to see if this casualty was one of the pumpkins Stu had especially high hopes for.
She stepped on another chunk of gourd, slimy underfoot. Could it be a herd of deer? Or something worse?
But that was silly. Deer wouldn’t destroy the entire pumpkin patch. Still, she began to run, her black Converse heavy on her feet.
Her pulse quickening, she began to worry that Fox Family Farm might not win the SPICE Pumpkin Weigh-off this year. The farm was going for a record-setting eighth consecutive win. And Stu’s meager pumpkin-based income kept him stocked with the essentials, namely firewood and beef jerky.
This trip marked her first return to Indiana in more than a decade, but nothing should have changed. The pumpkin patch should have been as familiar as a lullaby. But instead of the smell of rich, well-tended earth welcoming her, it smelled strange, like freshly cut grass mixed with manure and something musky. It wasn’t deer that had trespassed through the patch. It was what, elephants? Rhinoceroses?
Her father’s entire pumpkin patch, full of lush plants with big leaves and curlicue tendrils reaching for purchase, trampled. The fruit that grew from compact spheres to outrageously large orange shapes that looked like they’d melted in the sun, all butchered.
Sadie weaved around the patch breathlessly, hoping at least one plant had been spared. But she found nothing but broken vines and torn roots. Whatever had trashed Fox Family Farm had not been precise, but it had been thorough. Not unlike she’d been in her youth, when she destroyed the patch in a fit of teen angst.
This disaster was a sickening mirror of that one.
Her brow crumpled as she realized her purpose for returning to Pea Blossom, Indiana, had been undone by this decimation. She wished she could teleport back to LA and forget this flirtation with the pumpkin husbandry she used to love so much. This visit was supposed to redeem her past, not repeat it.
She’d made a promise to her father. To tend the pumpkins in his absence, after he told her there was no one else he could trust. When it came to the farm, she thought her teenage stunt had destroyed his trust along with the pumpkins, so the ask had come as a shock.
After the first Pea Blossom Pumpkin Massacre, Stu declared that Sadie would never inherit the farm. Fine with her; one less burden. Her sights were set far from Pea Blossom. But it hurt. When her mom left, it had been Sadie and Stu against the world. And suddenly, after one outburst, she was on her own.
So typical teenager Sadie iced out her father senior year, practically living in Pea Blossom High’s rinky-dink art studio. Then she’d moved away, and things slowly thawed between them. But like a microwaved burrito with a
frozen core, it still fucking sucked.
They’d never truly talked through their conflict, but he was a man of actions more than words. Since she agreed to look after the patch, she and Stu had been getting along just fine, no butting of heads. Maintaining his rigorous watering schedule and mercilessly squashing cucumber beetles would mean far more than mere apologies could communicate. This was an olive branch, an opportunity to prove once and for all that things were different.
And something sinister threatened to snap it in two.
She pulled her phone from the back pocket of her black jeans and gave him a call. As it rang, she raked her fingers through her hair. Her father answered with his usual greeting that sounded more like “yellow” than “hello.”
“The pumpkins are all gone,” she blurted. Saying it out loud sent her stomach into free fall.
“What did you do, Sarah?”
Those words starkly reminded her of why she’d stayed away so long. The instant assumption she was at fault. The reversion to her proper name, the one used only in anger.
“I didn’t do anything, Stu. Some animals trampled all the plants.”
“All of them?”
“Every single one.”
She heard his exhalation at the other end. Imagined him standing there, next to the hospital bed her uncle Fred had moved into his sunny living room during his convalescence. She could hear Fred in the background. “What’s happening, Stu?”
“And it wasn’t you?” he said after several more breaths.
The cold accusation slapped her in the face, and maybe she deserved it. Her hesitance to return to Pea Blossom for the growing season was outweighed by a strange sense of hope and fond memories of pumpkin growing. As a little girl she followed Stu around his pumpkins like a hound, absorbing everything he said. She hadn’t imagined those memories, had she?
“It wasn’t me, Stu.” Her voice was small. He’d made her feel small.
It was insulting to think she’d fly all the way to Indiana to sabotage the pumpkins. She could have ignored the curiosity that made her say yes. With the uptick in the demand for her artwork, she could claim the timing was bad. This hot iron needed striking. Of course, when did family emergencies care about timing? Not to mention, her father relied on the revenue from the pumpkin seeds. She couldn’t exactly fill in that gap herself.
“No,” Stu said at last. “Of course you didn’t. It’s a shock is all.” Something like an apology.
“I know.” Something like forgiveness.
“You gotta move all those pumpkins out so they don’t attract anything else. Maybe some of the plants can send up some new vines. Even if there aren’t pumpkins in time for the weigh-off, we might still collect seeds to sell.”
He wouldn’t give himself time to grieve. Quick flashes of anger followed by stoicism. She knew the pattern all too well because it was encoded into her cells, too.
“Okay. I’m going to move them all to compost now. I’ll let you know if I find out anything else.”
“Okay.” He hung up. Never one for long goodbyes either.
Sadie gathered her thoughts. The obvious temptation was to return to Los Angeles, to pick her next commission from the requests that had been pouring in. Her last client, influencer Brynn Bianchini, had posted innumerable selfies taken in front of the custom-dyed handwoven beige silk wallpaper Sadie had just completed.
Her caption raved about how perfect the color was, which made Sadie cringe. It had taken twenty-seven sample skeins of minutely different hand-dyed shades of beige until Brynn signed off on the one. Each successive skein drained her of creative energy, so of course Brynn ultimately decided on the first skein Sadie offered.
Then there were at least a dozen more samples of fabric until Brynn settled on a subtle moiré pattern. Sadie wasn’t eager for another project as soulless and stultifying as that fucking beige silk, but she couldn’t ignore the paycheck.
There were more just like it waiting for her in California if she wanted to continue weaving on commission. She didn’t have to stay in Pea Blossom. Fox Family Farm only needed her for the giant pumpkins. Without them, her local uncle, Bud, made a perfectly fine choice to mind the property, and she could beat a
hasty retreat.
She couldn’t jump to practicality and stoicism as quickly as her father had. Instead, she circled back around to anger.
She wanted to prove to him that her skills were still sharp, that she could grow a pumpkin as big as anyone in the state. To demonstrate that she wasn’t the punk teenager who once kicked a hole in all of his pumpkins in one angry outburst. She hadn’t realized how hungry for victory, for redemption she was until she first laid eyes on the pumpkin patch, but it all came back in a rush. Los Angeles may be the place that tried to mellow its denizens into a state of dreamy relaxation, but it hadn’t taken the fight out of her. She’d been able to reinvent herself from a country bumpkin into an in-demand textile artist.
But the bumpkin was still inside her. And she was angry.
She picked up one of the pumpkins. Almost whole except for one big bite, its skin still the palest yellow. She threw it toward the woods at the edge of the pumpkin patch with all her might, like a shot-putter. As she heaved the pumpkin, she let out the most primal of screams.
Everything came out of her in that scream. That shamefully vicious teenage anger that had made her destroy this patch once. Her frustration at agreeing to come back to Pea Blossom when she ought to have known it would disappoint her. Anger with her father for assuming the worst of her. And sheer rage at whatever had actually trampled the property, losing her father thousands of dollars. Losing her a shot at glory.
One scream wasn’t quite enough to express all of that, so she let out another, heaving a second pumpkin chunk toward the dogwoods and redbuds whose spring flowers adorned the farm.
Who cared about the compost pile? She was going to scream and throw pumpkins until she lost her voice or ran out of pumpkins, whichever came first.
While she was taking a breath, she heard a rustling in the forest to her left. Her fight–or-flight instinct kicked in, choosing fight decisively. Ready to rip apart the destructive animals with her bare hands, she turned to the noise. A hog came bumbling out of the woods, pumpkin guts hanging from its mouth in long strings. Sadie screamed again and threw a pumpkin at the hog. It landed just short of him. The hog picked up a piece of the shattered flesh in its mouth and trotted off.
ds drew her attention. An incongruously tall figure approached through the thick foliage. A path had been cut through the woods between her father’s property and the next, one that hadn’t been there in her youth.
Her first thought was Bigfoot. Then she noticed the figure was not alone.
A man, or possibly a woodland elf, emerged atop a white horse. Wavy chestnut hair fell to his sharp chin. Skin a couple shades more bronze than Sadie’s ghostly fair complexion. His features were both long and sharp, with dark slashes of eyebrows set at a worried angle. He wore a plaid Western shirt and olive green trousers. She’d never seen him before in her life; he certainly wasn’t from Pea Blossom. He halted his horse in the clearing as Sadie held one of the ruined pumpkins against her chest, ready to hurl it at him.
“I heard screaming,” he said. “Is something the matter?” ...
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