BY BRUCE MEYER
Even after market on the last Saturday of October there were still too many pumpkins left over. Some had been rejected at the stall where the first waxed turnips and the last of the autumn apples had been snapped up leaving an empty space where they had been displayed. Some were misshapen through no fault of their own, having grown next to a larger, more determined gourd that became a successful pumpkin, ridged, nicely and evenly orange without a touch of green on its girth, and swollen to a perfect jack-o-lantern shape with a sturdy green stem. The failures had been off-loaded from the flatbed while their forsaken siblings floated in the sea of mud as the first snow melted in a sweat upon their skin. The fields would have to be cleared before the heavy snow so a crop of alfalfa could take the place of the pumpkins once the soil thawed and April made the ground new again.
This is the time of year when on a drive up and down the back roads pumpkins sit on people’s porches and smile back with evil, ghoulish expressions cast by the candles inside them. Some are found on the roads, their bodies smashed and their faces broken beyond recognition, but at least they made it to their purpose. They lived and died according to the code that governs pumpkins. They became what they did even if they ended badly. What is troubling are the disappointments.
Understand that the disappointments have their uses. They end up in pies, but only so long as pumpkin pie is in season. The taste for it wears thin after a month or two. The elongated, the overly flat, the ones that grew at odd angles and did everything they could not to look like pumpkins, they too had a destiny to fulfill that was not fulfilled. Imagine them at night, their roots rising from the earth in sinewy, dusty threads of fingers, and as the first snow falls to declare there is nothing permanent – not even in the sky – picture them clutching their heads with those tendril hands and fingers and shrieking silently to themselves with faces they were never given, rotting where they were born, knowing they could have been something better but never achieving it. They are lying beneath the cold sky and waiting for the voices of intercession to hear their prayers from mouths they never had.
Bruce Meyer is author of 67 books of poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and literary non-fiction. He lives in Barrie, Ontario.