You once said: Loneliness is a regime.
Rose Himber Howse
Deep in its clutches was a man who told us that the earth is male. In the heart of the Driftless, the prairie dimpled into a lone butte. The man stood in its jagged shadow, always with his refrain: We will be the last to go hungry.
He wielded zucchini fruits like spears and we fried the blossoms, the weevils that had burrowed into the flour blackening in the oil. He sliced radishes whose innards were pink as a tongue and you waited for him to leave to take the last of the honey crystals, rub them on the radish and say: Pretend it is a persimmon, sopping with juice.
Each morning when I brought him the egg that had appeared in the coop, his plump hand closed a little meaner around mine. One day, he pressed so hard my fingers plunged through the shell.
Out past the garden I let the yolk ooze onto the pile of excised things: hairy soldier weed plucked up by the root, the blighted carrots pocked with weeping sores. Tomatoes that were taut as pregnant bellies before they split down their centers.
I thought it was a crumpled doily in your palm that night, like something left behind on the nightstand of a woman old enough to remember what things were like before the war. But threaded through the white clump were the green filaments, remnants of the stem of the Queen Anne’s Lace.
Abortifacient is a word with many spiny edges. To soothe their poking, you made me nettle tea. You felt I needed salt, slipped oak leaves into the pickle jars to sooth their pucker with cool alkaline.
Dissent is a flower, passed from hand to hand.
Rose Himber Howse is a recent graduate of the MFA program in fiction at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she served as fiction editor of The Greensboro Review. Her fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Hobart, Sonora Review, Joyland, YES! Magazine, and elsewhere.
twitter and insta: @rosehimber