March 2025 "Enormous Vegetables" by Julie Calvert

Here in this house; curtains billowing in the wind, and the windows themselves, a gateway to vegetables. Yes, Dear Reader, vegetables. They were outside, illuminated by the lightning ahead. Their size, if you believe it, Dear Reader, was un-magnanimous. Yes, yes, very unforgiving, for they crushed the terrain where they lay. Not intentionally, I assure you, but still unforgiving, for they are not sentient. They cannot forgive.

The vegetables arrived on Tuesday, March 15th, an unsuspecting day. The cabbages were reminiscent of cumulus clouds on a late afternoon. The bell peppers rolled down the foothills upon touchdown. The carrots were parked in the drive-in theater like limousines. The beets laid in the alfalfa fields where the cows found great disinterest in their presence. The tomatoes relaxed in the redwoods in the foothills. The garlic clumped together in the old fairgrounds, their skins falling off and blowing in the wind.

Nobody knew where they came from, of course. Scientists and farmers alike were interviewed for the purpose of uncovering the reason behind these goliath greenies and the like–but no one had an answer. The artists and poets found great use of them, for they found great inspiration in the vast vegetables. Painter Sal Sparacello loved to mix the vegetables up in his paintings. He placed the garlic in the vast alfalfa fields and the tomatoes bobbing in the sea. Another artist, Anna Ziemniak, simply decorated the garlic with sprawling big tops in between them.

Businessmen, more specifically the big suits behind the fair, began to use the garlic as an attraction at the fair. The whole grounds were renamed to “Garlicville” and all concessions were garlic flavored. Garlic ice cream. Garlic popcorn. Garlic pizza. Where were they getting all the garlic from, you ask, Dear Reader? Why, the garlic itself. You might think that they would have wanted to leave it be, as it was the catalyst for such an economic boom. A symbol of prosperity, one might say. But any, and all attempts in the early days of the vegetables, before they had come to accept them, they attempted to eat and sell them away, via harvest, were unsuccessful. They simply grew back their vegetation the following morning. If you cut a square cubic foot out of the carrot, it would be back the next day. This slighted no one.