Читать книгу The Giant Baby - Laurie Foos - Страница 5

ONE

We should have known when we grew the baby that things would turn out the way they did. earl and I, we never should have thought we could get away with having any kind of baby, never mind a giant baby like the one we grew out in the garden. We never had any luck. Not in that garden of ours, at least. We planted tomatoes, and they turned into pomegranates. We planted corn, but the ears split and bloomed into cabbage leaves. And the carrots, oh, the carrots. Down in the ground we dug, and up came some of the longest and thickest cucumbers we'd ever seen.

Sometimes I forget that things aren't the same for other people as they are for Earl and me. Sometimes I even forget that there are other people out there, that they exist. People who plant one thing and grow another. People who have no interest in seeds or don't even have a garden. I forget that there is anyone but earl and me now that the giant baby is gone. he was the one thing we grew that we had hope for.

It wasn't that we didn't love the giant baby or think of him as ours, as belonging to us. he didn't grow inside me, the way most babies grow inside their mothers, but this is a new world we live in. Some babies grow in dishes in labs, and some in the bellies of other women who then give the baby they've grown to its mother. There are all kinds of ways that babies grow, and so what if the way we grew ours wasn't what you'd call “conventional”?

So what?

So what, we said, Earl and I. Who would possibly care that our baby was not grown inside a woman, but in the garden where we planted him?

He grew in our yard near the raspberries that turned into radishes and the orange tree that collapsed under the weight of the pumpkins that sprouted among the leaves. Who would possibly care what we did in the privacy of our own yard? Who was anyone to say that what we did was wrong?

We grew the baby in the yard. We grew him, Earl and I, and we loved him—I think we really did—like he was ours because he was ours.

Until he wasn't anymore.