Women of Fruits and Flowers

Imitation of Gabriel García Marquez for Pierre’s Magical Realism class

As the soil warmed in April, a lovely face appeared among the sprouts and spirals of the strawberry fields. The farmer who owned the land would not have noticed it, if not for the wide, clear eyes of a girl blinking up at him from among the leaves. A butterfly danced on her forehead, and bees darted between the strawberries beside her ears, and still she did not flinch. Her skin, soft and unwrinkled, glinted as the pale Monday light met the dewdrops that decorated the bridge of her nose. The farmer called for his wife, who came with netting to protect the young bud and made an effort to keep the soil damp.

By May, the girl’s torso had appeared, pushing up through the earth like an infant from its mother. As she grew, the strawberry plants followed her, encasing her chest in a coil of the greenest shoots and tendrils. The women of the town braided white silk ribbons and camellia blossoms into her hair with light, careful touches, avoiding the stems and fronds that seemed to emerge from her skin. They dabbed her cheeks with damp cloth smelling of roses until her skin gleamed like polished wood. As they caressed and fawned over her, they remarked on her beauty and lost themselves in tales from long ago, when they too were young and darling. With the wisdom of seasons, the women named her Laureola. One woman, who had seen more springtimes than the rest could imagine, quieted her trembling hands and cupped the girl’s dimpled cheeks. She observed the redness of the strawberries on the ground beside them from behind heavy eyelids, and nodded.

Each afternoon, the women gathered outside their houses and collected a wicker basket of bread and sweets, which they brought to Laureola in a long procession. She sampled fresh raspberry jam, fudge with nuts, and sweet potato cubes topped with a layer of brown sugar until her stomach grew swollen and scraped against the earth. Her favorite, baked by the butcher’s wife, was honey cake, which left her lips and chin sticky and dripping gold. As she ate, the farmers’ young daughters held Laureola’s hands and kissed her cheeks and hair, giggling when they found that she tasted like strawberries.

Laureola’s hips emerged from the earth, and then her thighs, entangled in stems and rough with leaves. She had the appearance of a woman, and stood watching the farmers harvest the other fruits in the field and load boxes into their trucks. One man pressed a dirty thumb into her skin and deemed her soft enough with a smile that held a quiet aggression. The townspeople looked up at her, pleased that they had nurtured her so well, and tried to slice through the shoots tethering her to the ground with their fingernails, but her roots held firm and Laureola was not carried off that day. The women tried to free her with the kitchen knives that they used to slice bread, to no avail. The men snuck peeks at her and muttered to themselves as they worked. Laureola, left by herself but for a few lonely strawberries, urged the earth to keep her in her place, fearful of the places she might end up.

By mid-summer, the strawberries were rotting. Bugs squirmed over Laureola’s feet and crawled up her legs, nipping at her skin until she bled as if the bruised and wrinkled fruits adorning the ground weren’t feast enough. Three ants made their home in her belly button. A thick perfume of decay, nauseatingly sweet, seeped into her welts and made her feel like the weight of seven atmospheres was pressing down on her. Above, the sun burned so hot that her smooth skin blistered and peeled. Laureola sunk to the ground and dug her hands into the earth, hoping to find the dampness of springtime, but the soil was dry and scattered with lizard carcasses and twisting rodent tails. She ran her fingers up her legs to nurse her scratches and brush off a layer of flies, and narrow tracks of dirt appeared behind her touches. The juice of festering strawberries dripped down her thighs.

Men had appeared at all corners of the farm, sucking at cigars as they leaned on the fence posts. Acrid smoke burned Laureola’s nostrils and made her eyes water. She pretended that she could taste honey cakes, sip sweet cream from a porcelain pitcher, feel the gentle butterfly kisses of the children. The women no longer congregated to assemble a basket for her. Through the open windows of the nearby houses – in the late-summer heat, the rooms were growing stuffy – she could see them whispering, glancing at her out of the corners of their eyes. She felt sweat slithering along her hairline as she looked down at her hips, crusted over with streaks of mud and juice and an itchy coat of dust, and she understood.

The farmers and their sons wondered if she still tasted like berries. It was long past time to pluck her, it seemed. They stared at the stems that adorned her body in delicate patterns of spirals and curlicues and dreamed of uprooting her. She stood in the field now, as if she could begin to run at any moment, perched on the tips of her toes. They imagined her teetering when the stems were severed, arms swinging like a butterfly after a child tears one wing. They imagined her falling and crushing what remained of the strawberries and being enveloped in red syrup, the grays of dried up leaves and rat tails, and black beetles hungry to burrow inside of her.

Laureola allowed herself to wither and shrink to the ground where her feet remained tethered. She wished that strawberries had thorns, or bark, because really, I am here in the open with all of hell pressing in on me with axes and hungry smiles and all of heaven simply observing, and all of you women with your wrinkles of a hundred autumns can cock your heads behind glass panes and wooden shutters but I have none of that, do I? She waited for the coming seasons, when rain and snow would cleanse her, and perhaps her face would swell from cold and her cheeks would become round and soft once more, and perhaps ice might look like dewdrops on the bridge of her nose, and perhaps the ants might find a new home. As leaves fell down from the trees on the edges of the field, Laureola dug a hole and tried her best to sink. A possum scurried over her limp form and took her flesh in its mouth. She softened and stretched, and finally the men’s gazes turned from those of the fiercest cravings to those of disgust. Snow fell and encased her, and for once Laureola was out of reach.

When the soil warmed the following April, a new face appeared among the sprouts and spirals and what remained of Laureola’s appendages as they unfroze. The bugs and lizards and rats had gone, but the women lingered in the windows and the farmers roamed the field. Laureola, reduced to the tiniest of shriveled stems, weakly gripped the strawberry girl and pulled in a panic, hoping to bring her back into the earth, but the girl hardly felt a tickle. As the springtime sun rose and the field erupted in a haunting lullaby of soft blinks and buzzing, Laureola finally dissolved, and was replaced.

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Eva Knowles '22