By Anne Panning
When our two children were small, every year we visited Golden Gourds Pumpkin Patch for Halloween. But it was not just a pumpkin patch: it was an all-out carnivalization of capitalism! $10 admission x 4 = $40 just to park in a muddy field. Then, unabashedly, other pay-for options were splayed in front of us: apple cider, apple cider donuts, hayrides, kiddie train rides, face painting, fortune telling and the like—all extra. A swindle, really!
But one year, the biggest curiosity of all happened to be a perfectly square pumpkin. It sat, cordoned off with red velvet ropes, on a silver platter atop a hay bale pyramid like a rare jewel. Its orange corners glowed in the dying afternoon light. A woman dressed as a scarecrow guarded it. I could tell because she stood, arms akimbo, hay pieces falling out of her flappy muslin sleeves. Her eyes seethed through the riotous crowd with the bitter, sweeping coldness of Secret Service agents.
Our children wanted to touch it, to hold it: they screamed to hold it! So we steered them towards the sad, patchy goats and bought feed from an old gumball machine for the kids to offer them. “Don’t get your fingers bitten off!” we warned.
To interact with the square pumpkin, the size of, say, a basketball, but squished- square, required a “donation” of $100.00. I muttered, “Fuck that,” but the kids cried and cried. They needed to hold the square pumpkin! The novelty! And I, I must admit, grew very curious about the origins of the thing. And leery. Dubious. I’d always been so. “Let’s fucking do it,” my husband said and peeled five twenties out of his wallet.
We were ushered into a brown canvas tent in the far, far reaches of woods. The kids’ eyes glowed white in the dark. My husband had to hunch because of his height, and I found myself hunching in solidarity. A small man with golden eyes and stiff white hair sat behind a table with the square pumpkin in front of him. He gestured us closer and we sat in four folding chairs opposite him. He held the square pumpkin with outstretched fingers, as if he were giving it a scalp massage.
“I am Mr. Shadecrest,” he said. He stood and bowed. My husband and I nodded with praying hands. “Each child can hold it.” He pushed forward the pumpkin. “But only one at a time.” The kids fought about it. Of course they fought! Who first. How long. Who next.
“But how does it get to be square?” I asked as the kids fondled the oddity.
“Ah, a secret,” Mr. Shadecrest said. My husband pulled out his phone to take a picture but Mr. Shadecrest held up a hand. “No photographs, please.” We eyerolled each other. Would this be another surcharge, to take a photo? Or would we be expected to buy something else? A commemorative postcard? A t-shirt? It was indeed the most perfectly symmetrical piece of produce I had ever seen. How quaint on a kitchen island! Such a conversation starter! Despite myself, I wanted to own the square pumpkin.
“The showing is over,” Mr. Shadecrest said. “You will exit to the left.” We shuffled toward the open tent flap, where a freckled young woman with red braids handed us a small gift bag in a confetti print. Solemn, silent. We filed out.
Inside, a clear acrylic box. Inside the box, a single pumpkin seed. The instructions read, “Moisten seed. Insert in box. Grow.” It was, quite simply, a square mold. And over the years, we would grow many square pumpkins. So many, in fact, that our own home became a carnival of oddities, and we became, quite simply, rich.
~~~
Anne Panning’s debut poetry collection, Spit & Glitter, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She has published a memoir, Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss, as well as a novel, Butter. Her short story collection, Super America, won The Flannery O’Connor Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She has also published short work in places such as Brevity, Prairie Schooner, Passages North, Craft Literary Magazine, Quarterly West, Kenyon Review, and River Teeth. She teaches creative writing at SUNY-Brockport and is working on her next book, Bootleg Barber: A Daughter’s Memoir.