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spectacles. But the only insects afflicting the crop were the flies hovering over the rotten pumpkins on the other side of the field. Every so often I would find a specimen that had been punctured or torn – the growth powder sometimes accelerated things too much - and my hands would punch through the rotten rind, into the maggot-strewn interior. I was used to critters of all kinds – snakes and worms and crickets and toads – but this challenged even my resolve.
    Not all the rotten pumpkins lay at the other end of the field, though. Those that Mr. P took for his heads, no matter how short a time he wore them, he buried, in a plot of land adjacent to the pumpkin fields. In the last few months the number of graves had increased severely so that it looked like the graveyard of a small town, much like the town I grew up in. Looking at that field of buried heads made me think of my parents and how much I missed them. Their graves lay far away in Quadling Country.
    If critters weren’t to blame, I thought, it might be the soil. So I planted some other crops beside the pumpkins – some squash, some beets, some cucumbers. All turned out fine. It was only the pumpkins that seemed to be affected.
    It stymied me. As I tended the current crop, they looked good to my critical eye, plump and glossy, heavy to the hand. It seemed only when they were picked that they started to deteriorate, turning to mush within weeks. Once, Mr. P had told me, a head would last months for him. Possibly up to a year if well cared for. Some property in his body, or perhaps the force that animated it, kept them hardy. But recently, it was weeks, if that. The last had only endured for nine days. I thought about what it might be like if I had to change my head every week and I wondered how I could function.
    “ How’s it coming?” came Mr. P’s voice from behind me.
    I bent over the pumpkins, running my fingers across the creases. “I’m making progress,” I said. “But not as much as I would like.”
    The voice came closer. “I feel better today,” he said. “The new head seems to help.”
    I nodded, unable to face him. I couldn’t overcome the thought that I was letting him down. That I was failing him.
    “ Thank you for helping me,” he said. “I know you’re doing your best.”
    I bowed my head.
    “ No. Really,” he said. “Please.” I stood up and turned to face him.
    And almost screamed.
    One of Mr P’s eyes sunk low on his pumpkin face, as if flowing down, as if made of wax. The other jaunted at an unusual angle, casting that side of the face in a demonic light. That eyebrow was high and menacing. The other was a deep, crude gash in the face. The nose was a mere slit, the mouth a vicious sneer tearing across the lower curve of the pumpkin.
    “ What is it?” he said, stumbling back.
    I shook my head, unable, unwilling to speak the words.
    I swallowed, trying to suppress my horror, to spare his feelings, but I was apparently ineffective, for he ran off, his wooden limbs pumping to put as much distance between us as possible.
    When he was gone, I turned and collapsed among the pumpkins, running my fingers through the dirt to console myself, inhaling the earthy, mineral scent. My tears watered the soil, partially from fear, and partially from the knowledge that I had hurt my employer.
     
    The day’s activities, like every day, left half moons of dirt beneath my fingernails. Some days the combination of soil and pumpkin pulp left a reddish cast like blood, and I was once again reminded of my parents.
    They died when I was barely a woman, though I had already spent long years toiling in the garden. A disease swept through the Quadling countryside, a red disease like everything in that place. I was spared, but my parents bore the full brunt of it, stiffening and reddening until they looked like radishes laid out in bed. They, like the others stricken with the disease, were taken to the graveyard and buried. There were memorial