BY Lucy zhang
Every summer, we harvest three things: tomatoes, luffa squash, and gourd babies. The luffa squash disappear quickly in soups and stir fries—the key to everlasting youth, the elder of us claim. Our gourd baby harvest is always the least fruitful—unevenly bulged stomachs and swollen heads that seem like they might topple from their weight and roll to the ground, crushing the fallen tomatoes that have split. We can afford to feed tomatoes back into the earth and suck the remainder like lychee fruit, more sweet than sour—so much so we worry the tomatoes have drained the soil of all the iron we bled, droplet by droplet as you’d collect rain from a drought. But it’s not like our gourd babies have shriveled. They grow rapidly in all the wrong places. We cull the majority in hopes a few end up proportionally correct. It’s like how one bad apple turns the batch bad, and although they all receive our equal love, it takes little—a lullaby sung several decibels too loudly, the yard left uncovered by the awning one evening, the earth starved the month we failed to bleed and kiss and worship these unseen roots as though they expect us to peer below the mantle as we would within our womb.
Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, CRAFT, The Spectacle, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks HOLLOWED (Thirty West Publishing) and ABSORPTION (Harbor Review). Find her at https://lucyzhang.tech or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.