The Roundness of Being Pumpkin

by Laura J. Morefield

From the time he was a mere bud, he knew what he wanted to be—what he was meant to be, really.  He drank deeply from the vine in every sense, listening to the strictures and advice with a reverence unusual in one so young.  Even the Mother commented on it and the Pumpkin swelled.

He was meant to be round and full.  He could feel it in the way he happened to be nested on several soft thatches of hay.  He ached for it as he drew sweet chlorophyll from the vine’s narrow tubes.  He heard it in the whispers of brother pumpkins sharing the vine and in the ancient knowledge that flowed along their conjoining pathway.  His destiny was to be round.  His goal grew organically from there.

At night, when the moon glowed above in inspirational spherity, the vine told her pumpkins the secrets of being round.  The constant, soft suckling that produced a pleasing heaviness, rather than greedy gulps (which often resulted in an unpleasant and elongated shape).  The giving off of slightly acrid scents (rather than the sweetness of pumpkin) that would ward off flies and bees.  Some of the brothers protested that flies and bees scratched places that leaves could not reach.  But the vine reminded them that pockmarks were unattractive.  Unattractive to the children.

The question rushed back to the Mother like buzzing on her twisting limbs.  Children?  And because it was the roundness of time, because the moon was completely full in the last week of September, she told them the legend of Fall.  How all the Mothers had known from seedlinghood about the harvest festival.  The brothers wanted to know what seedlinghood meant and the vine patiently told them of seeds, fertilization and germination, sprouting and roots.  The Pumpkin waited, his shell tingling, until she turned her attention back to the festival and the children.

“It is your calling,” she said, “the calling of all our pumpkin offspring to light the world during the festival.  To be light for human children.”  She went on, saying how this calling was fruition of the Mothers’ dreams, the pumpkins’ promise and fulfillment all at once.

But the Pumpkin was busy thinking.  Ah-ha, he mused.  So this is my purpose.  I am round and full. My shell is smooth and hard.  I am beautiful.  I am Pumpkin so that I can be the best harvest light for the children.  He imagined himself glowing like the All-Mother moon above.  And he became even more diligent in his careful sucking and his purposeful scent.  He was Pumpkin and he would be perfect.

The day of the harvest was a revelation.  The Mother trembled as the human cut the first of her pumpkins away and they all felt the sear of separation.  To most of the brothers, the pain was fear.  But to the full, round Pumpkin, it was joy.  Tonight the moon would shine on him in a different place.  He would be light and he would be Pumpkin.

As the pruning hook sliced him away from the Mother, he felt her sadness.  He whispered to her that he would make her proud but realized in the silence returned to him that she had not heard him.  For the first time, she could not hear him.  And he could not draw from her.  He felt a tightening as a part of him hardened and dried in the air.  Hands lifted him and he rode a long strip toward a waiting group of other pumpkins.  Some were long and many were pocked.  Others were heavy and full and some, he admitted, were even as round as he.  He watched them drop softly from the conveyor strip onto a wide pile of brothers from other vines and felt his excitement build with each leap to the pile.

At the top of the conveyor, he stopped.  The container beneath him rumbled away and he watched his brothers depart.  A new container approached but the Pumpkin was distracted by the view of the Mothers.  He could feel them in every direction, spread out in their winding glory, shorn of their pumpkins but shimmering green in the morning sun.  He thought he could tell which one was his Mother, but he really couldn’t after all.

The container stopped below and the Pumpkin felt peace at the rightness of his place as the first in line.  He was Pumpkin, after all, and his roundness, heaviness, perfect skin and perfect plumpness warranted being first.  And so he was.

He was jarred when the floor rushed abruptly up to meet him.  There was no straw to cushion his fall, but he brushed away his uneasiness and welcomed the others around him excitedly.  They must all have been whispering to him too, but without the vine it was hard to hear.  It wasn’t until the third layer of brothers started piling on top of him that Pumpkin thought, there must be some mistake.  The pressure was at first merely uncomfortable, but by the time weight had stopped building and the container had rumbled away, it was barely endurable.

I’m being crushed.  The Pumpkin sent panicked thoughts to his neighbors, imagining that he heard their distress in return.  It was too much.  He had spent months doing everything right.  Suckling just enough and never greedily.  Resting lightly on his hay.  Growing into the roundness of Pumpkin and paying attention to all the Mother’s words.

And yet, here he was, slowly mashing down under the weight of his brothers.  He felt the softening of that which had been firm before.  Small fissures opened up in his perfect roundness. His pumpkin-ness reduced by degrees as the day wore on.  Even the moon was no comfort for although he felt the coolness of night, no glimmer of light penetrated the layers above him and there, in the bottom of the container, the Pumpkin despaired.

In the morning, the rumbling stopped.  The Pumpkin heard voices and shouting and gradually, the pressure on him eased as hands pulled his brothers off one by one.  The easing weight encouraged him yet he still felt the softness inside and the misshapen-ness of his cracked shell, and he knew that his vision of being the perfect light for the children would not be his purpose after all.  As he was lifted in the air, he saw his brothers, all sizes and shapes, pockmarked and perfect, jumbled together in a bin.  Something wonderful and round started to build inside the pumpkin.

“This one’s no good.”

“Throw it in the trash.”

He heard the words as clearly as if they came from the Mother.  As he was sailing through the air, the roundness inside him bloomed even larger.  He was suddenly without weight, without shape against the curving sky.  Then he hit hard against the ground beside the trash barrel.

And as he burst open in the autumn air, as he opened and offered his flesh, his seeds to the ravens that landed beside him, he had a pumpkin epiphany.  It was a flash of orange that lit him up inside and for a moment, he was as round and spherical as the moon.

Ah.  This is why I sprouted.  Drank deeply from the Mother.  Lived.  Died.

This.