Although it had only cost her two hundred dollars to buy the estate, she said that when the deed had been transferred into her possession, that it was akin to reclaiming a lost part of herself. The farm had belonged to her grandparents for many years before the government seized the property. She held fond memories of the summers that she used to spend there long ago; harvesting the rich tubers from the soil, petting the family ass, or swinging off the Toyo tire and plunging deep into the icy water of the abandoned amosite quarry nearby. Ever since one evening when she lay out in the dew-soaked pastures, looking up at the deep yawning abyss of stars and interplanetary miscellanea, she knew that her purpose in life was to harvest potatoes. New Brunswick was full of potato farmers, indeed, many of the denizens who she had been acquainted with as an adolescent earned a wage growing spuds, but she was determined to grow the potatoes most plentiful of starch and abundant with nutrients than any other agricultural institution in Canada.
Her parents had begotten a male of inferior mental capacity whom they had neglected to name before they had disowned him on account of his condition. After his favourite musical composer, she entitled him Merzbow. He was a tall, somewhat androgynous child-shaped man; a timid creature of introverted tendency who only ever spoke to his big sister. As anyone who knew Merzbow as well as anyone who could have known Merzbow would tell you, was that his waking (and a fraction of his dreaming) life was spent listening to Merzbow. Any interpersonal relationship was scarce. Yet, out of loyalty to his sister, in whom he had invested a great deal of trust, he decided to accompany her on her agricultural conquest.
The first week of her potato farming saw her spend the necessary capital to restructure the crumbling farmhouse and purchase nitrogen-enriched fertilizer with which to optimize her yield. On Saturday evenings, when Merzbow was securely fastened into his crib, she drove her Cadillac Eldorado out to the nearby municipality of Miramichi. She would park the automobile in a garage and stand scantily-clad, bathed in the twilight of the streetlamps on Main Street. She would wait for an hour, perhaps even two, before a client would pull up beside her and inquire about her wares. The usual fee was twenty dollars. The client would then drive her back to his apartment (which on occasion was a house) and possess her in ways that bordered upon the unsavoury. Her raison d’être may have been potato farming, but her second love was prostitution. Suffice to say that she had missed the Sunday sermon which denounced the inclination to be fucked by strangers. To her, it wasn’t masochism, nor was it a manifestation of self-hatred, but merely an honest hobby which she held dear. When she had earned a reasonable profit by harvesting tubers, her dream, as she called it, was to open the very first potato and hooker franchise to satisfy both the genitalia and digestive cavities of all the good citizens of New Brunswick.
It was on one particular night, upon returning home from her sordid sexual escapades, that she was to find her brother unconscious on the bathroom floor. To her mortification, he had consumed an entire bottle of oestrogen supplements, using a ball peen hammer to incur his retarded wrath down upon the child-proof cap. Both frightened and angry, she had known that a transgression of this nature was only inevitable, as Merzbow had lately shown the intention of escaping his crib and that night she had neglected to fasten his straps properly. After she had awoken him, he received a thorough lecture about the dangers of wanting freedom.
“Merzbow, what did you think you were doing? Why did you eat all my oestrogen?”
“I thought they were skittles.”
He had an expression that resembled remorse; an upturned lip and hollow, sad eyes.
“You’re probably going to start growing tits now Merzbow!”
She slapped him upside the head, not hard enough to induce injury, but sufficient to convey her frustration with him. Merzbow retreated back to the solitude of his bedroom and cranked Venereology at maximum volume. She returned later to fasten him into his crib—tightly.
After months of strenuous labour, she had grown enough crops to nourish the both of them. Farming potatoes was a cold, methodical process; the sowing of the sprouts and the raising of the crop. Her farming skills were superlative. Long ago, her grandfather had shown her how to cultivate the land with competence. When he wasn’t listening to Merzbow, Merzbow usually helped water the plants or spray pesticides in order to kill the beetles that gnawed away at the stems, rendering the potatoes unfit for human consumption.
She noticed two odd protrusions on his head one evening at suppertime.
“Now look what you’ve done to yourself Merzbow! You’re sprouting horns from that oestrogen you ate. Perhaps you should see a doctor."
As she had scolded him several times about speaking with his mouth full, he devoured his mouthful of mashed potato; the gargantuan under-bite flapping loosely beneath his palate and chewing the starchy substance into a fine paste by which to fall with greater ease down Merzbow’s esophagus and into the confines of his digestive tract.
“I don’t want to see a doctor.”
“But those things are like an inch long! Who knows if they will get any bigger? You don’t want to look like a freak, now do you?"
At her response, Merzbow burst into a tantrum of blubbering tears. He stumbled out of his high-chair and run back to his room. The door slammed and she could hear the faint sound of 1930 being played on his stereo. Once he had weeped himself to exhaustion, she tightly strapped him back into his crib. She always thought that Merzbow looked so peaceful, so tranquil after a good cry. The moonlight poured in through the window and caressed the back of Merzbow’s malformed skull. She reached out and felt the protrusions on his head between the grip of her thumb and forefinger. They were tough, yet weightless like gristle or Styrofoam.
“It’s probably nothing to worry too much about.” She thought, and closed the door to his room behind her.
Silently and gracefully, she slipped into her plastic mini-skirt and zipped up her knee-high leather boots to prepare for yet another evening of vice upon the streets of Miramichi. She got into her Eldorado and drove to the same parking garage and stood at the same avenue at which she prostituted herself every week, yet no clients availed themselves to her. She was devastated. She waited for four hours. She waited for Vern and his Hyundai Sonata, who had called upon her services many times, for Larry and his Ford Econo with trash bags stretched over the windows in which the two of them would fuck like hyenas, or even for Gus, the filthy, hairy Vietnam veteran who had a smelly cock and always underpaid. None of them came. She drove back to the farmhouse in shame.
As her Eldorado pulled up the gravel road to the farmhouse, it seemed to her that the potato pastures emitted a soft red glow. The moon was full that night and the rolling landscape was soaked in the sun’s borrowed light. However, there was something particularly askew about the glow of the fields. She would not have the mind to pay this anomaly its due consideration, as when she went into the bathroom to remove her pomegranate no. 9 makeup and her pink plastic mini-skirt, she was confronted with an abhorrent scene. The very same protrusions that her brother had grown, lay upon her head as well, albeit nearly twice as long. The two naked bumps that poked above her hairline mocked her. They stood as a stark reminder that she would never again feel the embrace of a misshapen fisherman or quarry worker. Her spirits had descended to a depth from which the sunlight was no longer visible. Her dreams had been dashed to the ground, shattering into a myriad of unsalvageable bits and fragmentations. She stood motionless before the shattered dream that starred back at her from the bathroom mirror—an apoplectic horror captured within a pane of glass.
“You still have the potatoes.” She repeated to herself in a vain attempt at self comfort.
She awoke from a turbulent slumber the following morning to the urgent cries of her little brother. She rushed into his room and saw him motioning to the window.
“Smoke! Red Smoke! Look!” He kept saying in his rather unattractive speech impediment.
Sure enough, there were tuffs of red smoke billowing from the horizon that seemed consistent with an industrial smokestack or perhaps a modest-sized grease fire. The smoke appeared very dense and smothering. The colour was that of fresh, unoxidized blood.
She dressed Merzbow and herself in a violent fit, throwing on one of his old Merzbow t-shirts, and the two of them ventured out towards the source of the red smoke. After a half-hour walk over the hilly terrain, they came upon a large imposing structure. It bore smokestacks and chimneys that scraped the flesh of the morning sky.
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