Small Part of a Current Work of Fiction (The Onion Farmer's Daughter)

The Onion Farmer's Daughter

One Soul and Two Bellies

She is always coming back to me in dreams, the onion farmer's daughter with the dark hair like tangled reeds in a pond at dusk. She weaves in and out of my night-time wanderings, a shadow in white, her skin almost as pale, well, like an onion. She is beautiful in a gothic sort of way and always light on her feet. She must have been lovely when she was alive.

There is one soul that flits between Kathryn's and my belly all summer long – this onion farmer's daughter's soul, as if uncertain of where to land. It is not like that dove Noah sent out after the flood and there was one place to land. She has two peaks to choose between – two round white bellies, bursting with babies.

I sat eating my salad, grateful for the greens, as grateful had I been Rapunzel's mother. Shell was a Wiccan witch, but her greens held no charm. I was attracted by the skulls on the fencepost, an obvious reference to Baba Yaga. She was only ravenous in her lust for life – to rend things from the soil – to wrest babies from wombs and to twist people back into living, no matter how painful.

You see, I was not truly living when I encountered Shell, not living at all – merely ambulating through. It's damn painful to live and that's the truth, but the wild joy – like honeysuckle rambling up the fence is sure worth-it. The scratch of that metaphorical itch.

All summer, my husband and I would dig up change for the grocery store. At Shell's every week, I feasted on salad and good lean meat. She took me in and fed me and wrenched me toward living and out of the shadow-world I'd been inhabiting.

Percy's Mournful Banjo

His music has a way of creeping into the hollows like ivy with hands reaching. Percy makes banjo music sound mournful. He'd never play it too near the school, only in the wilds, a half-hour walk away on the narrow path. It is the saddest banjo I ever heard played.

His long white fingers move over the pearl inlaid arm, matte white on glossy white. It's a fine instrument fashioned by some country person with a bit of money, enough to have a son educated in the city. I wonder about the parents he never speaks of. I never talk of mother or Big Dad. There isn't much to say, except they live a hundred and seven miles to the north and west where the flat lands turn into hills that wear a sad blue cast in the evenings.

The girls say the woods are haunted, but it is probably the echo of Percy's Banjo. They would be horrified to see him now with his dark pants' legs rolled up and his pale tater feet in the water like some country man. They would be even more aghast to see him with me, who could never wash the stain of country life from her, having been brought to school by her mother in a simple rough-spun muslin dress, little better than a sack, save for a blue silk ribbon that was my mother's pride to have stitched to it.

No one saw Percy arrive at the school. He showed up one day in English class, a tall angular youth of twenty-five with fierce ringlets of red hair framing his Botticelli face. All the girls loved him and assumed him the son of some great Southern family, such a languid pale poetic man. I thought his face was rather too pinched, too infantile for a man, but still I fell in love with him.

He laid a white flower on my breast suddenly. So lost in thought was I, that I didn't hear his playing cease, nor notice that the light was failing in the east.