The Seed Spent

Cover by Austin Bieri (Instagram: austinexclamationpoint)

1.

A stud of the upper midwest, as potent now as he was in high school.

A milf in a pink cattle-print skirt: a signature look from her glory days at the strip club. They had seen each other a time or two before.

This time, the Skirt wasn’t poaching him from his mate. He was no longer a taken man—although this fact hadn’t mattered to either of them when he first paid her a visit.

Now, he was taking a piss behind the bar, sweeping cottonwood seeds in a splash. Stream as big as a garter snake leaping out of the rain. Dick wiggling like a bulldog.

She hollered at him to see what’s up. Her rowdy posse gawked at her sudden change of plans. She went off to do her thing while the girls stayed back, waiting for her to spill the tea.

He’s the same as he was, she told them. Talking too much. Save that mouth for when you go down south, I said. But he never went down on me. He sucked my titties, moaning, groaning about something—I should’ve listened—about bringing reporters to his property. He went for his pocket. For a moment, I lost my cool—is that a ring? But no. It was a used tobacco tin. Inside, he had a novelty.

Look here, he said. Don’t tell anyone. I found this on my farm the other day. Take a bite. Just try it.

What is it?

Fruit, he said.

Dense, sappy, real juicy. She had never seen anything like it before.

Whatever it was, she ate it, she ate it, she ate it, and—

He hadn’t even laid her up, and she was already squirming. Once she took a bite, her thighs quaked. Then it happened: the hardest and fastest climax of her life.

He’s pretty much the same, she told them. Same as his daddy. But that fruit’s another story.

2.

It had fallen from—where else? Outer space. Heaven above.

The pond was its landing pad. It narrowly missed, streaking the shore with a truck-wide path of earth before sliding into the water. Pulling it out was like wrestling a rhino, but one of the farmer’s trusty machines did the trick. He let the thing sit in the marshy ground where the water had splashed. Then he inspected it, feet sucking into the mud, hands groping the side of the thing. He pulled it up further, onto the grass. He decided it was most like a strawberry, despite its size. It was covered in a pattern of dimples hinting at seeds burrowed deep in the veiny flesh. The meat itself was like an apricot. He hesitated to call this bewildering thing a fruit, but what else could it be? Its aroma was undeniable.

As it turned out, there were no seeds in the dimples. There might be some in the center. If his dad were still at the farm, he would’ve forced him to cut it open. It was a thought that made him sick. His dad had his own way of dealing with the beauties that pleased him most: Dissect it outright, plant the good seed. Why stop at one fruit when you could have a whole garden of them?

The farmer preferred to treat the fruit tenderly. He slipped his finger into one of the divots, a mound that diverged around his knuckle with only slight elasticity. Pulled it out and saw how the hole managed to stay wide. Stuck it in again. It reminded him of another feeling, something enticing. Clear, iridescent discharge seeped from the crevice, coating his fingers. He went in again. There was more than just tightness making his finger tingle. The flesh wasn’t clenched as tightly as it was before, and yet his nerves felt an electric pressure.

Against better judgment, he satisfied his urge to lick his fingers.

Stimulation overtook his senses. He gouged out a piece of the fruit and ate it. The resin, the juice, whatever the secretion was, it went down his chin in gorgeous streams. He hopped back and forth, fanning his hands, his body bucking in reply to complete ecstasy.

3.

Down the county road a short few miles away, the folks at the sugar beet factory found a puzzle of their own. Wind had blown a scorched net of plant material into the factory. A gnarly web of vines clung to the building like an exoskeleton.

A team of men tore it down in a matter of hours and laid it out on the grounds for anyone to examine. To the farmer, it looked like a shell. He didn’t engage in the discussions of the droves of self-important rubberneckers who came to ponder for themselves.

While he took a closer look, he isolated himself from the others. As one of the youngest farmers in town, he found himself endlessly at the center of the old folks’ attention—for better or worse. A combination of revulsion and despondency kept the farmer from opening up to them, even on a good day. Today, he had even less patience for their comments. They never asked him about his work, only about the ways he exercised his youth: partying, fighting, fucking, keeping in shape. The goings-on of his personal life were a grotesque marvel to the older generation.

The discovery on his property might change their attitude about his boyishness. Like a man who struck oil, his fruit would bless him with good fortune. But he kept his lips sealed. Though the treasure wasn’t one he intended to keep secret for long, these old folks weren’t the audience he had in mind. He shuddered at the thought of muddy footprints all over his yard, hands on hips, scanning, touching, moving, ruining. The thought of having eyes watch how he spent his days. The thought of having his future decided for him. He wasn’t ready. He had to piece this mystery together on his own, as best he could, before the cameras came to make him rich.

4.

His dad wanted to know how the harvest was going. The farmer sighed and told him that it hadn’t started yet—a gamble of a correction. These days, with his dad stuck in assisted living, he was always in a fragile state of mind. Over the phone, he got volatile.

Don’t try to tell me I don’t know my shit. You need to be on top of things. What’s your plan? Oh you don’t got a plan. This ain’t supposed to be the easy part of the year. Don’t slack off. Don’t think I ain’t keeping an eye on the way you’re running my property. You ain’t no nepotism baby. If you don’t keep it well, I know some of your classmates would’ve run it the way it oughta be.

The farmer had already received some texts about work for the fall. A couple boys, seniors now. The only reliable seasonal work he had. Each one he took in was spry, muscular, and tanned in all the places that active outdoorsmen ought to be. When he first nabbed them, the boys caught up quickly. As relieved as he was at their strength and willingness to follow orders, he was dismayed at having little to teach them. By the end of their first contract, they were scarcely listening to him at all. He never remembered being so haughty at their age. One of the boys challenged him: Where are the men? How come we’re the oldest guys you hire? We can’t even vote.

It was only July. The headache that came with hiring could wait. Honestly, it wasn’t a logical decision to put it off. But it was so hard to care. He trusted his passive gut, always giving him power and attention to accomplish what was most important. The harvest would have its day. In the meantime, he could put his power and attention on that fruit.

He sent a picture of it to his ex. Down four beers, feeling bored, feeling lonely, it seemed like the right thing to do. No caption—words hated him, worked against him. Like the fruit itself, the photo had no apparent purpose. The farmer had no idea what he was proposing when he sent it. He couldn’t propose anything good on his own, but he could always play off of what came at him with the agility of a running back. She might read too much into the message. Or too little. Either way, he’d roll with it.

5.

What if he hears the engine? You’ll wake him, like right away. He’s used to the quiet of the countryside. And the headlights—shut them off. He’s gonna freak if he sees us snooping. Nighttime puts these hicks on edge. Do you like getting shot?

The Skirt had failed to change her cousin’s mind against going at night. Even while sitting in the passenger seat of his car, monitoring the pastoral shapes that pulled them forward in the dark, she vouched for the bad feeling in her stomach. But her cousin, who sat in the driver’s seat even though he needed directions to the farmer’s house, fought right back. In his mind, it was better to have his anonymous headlights wake up the farmer than to have his cousin’s memorable face in daylit clarity. Nighttime had long and faithfully been guardian to them both.

And what was this about getting shot? It was always a possibility with the shit he got roped into, but he had been lucky so far. The only mutilation he’d ever received came not from a gun, but the womb. His disability hadn’t been so visible until he learned in adulthood to swallow the shame that it brought. Now he let his bad hand perform front-and-center as the dominant. He gripped the steering wheel with it now, with the only two fingers he had, the middle and index. Three stubs took the place of the other digits.

Whenever she saw his fingers, whenever he touched her, whenever he used them on her, they appeared as hooks to her.

The problem wasn’t really that they were going at night. The Skirt had only wanted to go alone. It was her right to lead this project. Not only was there history, but there was intimacy between her and the farmer. He had shown her the fruit in confidence. Her humiliating habit of spilling too much to her cousin had sabotaged everything. It worried her that he had recognized the fruit’s potential so quickly. And now, thanks to her, his mind was already turning, churning out his latest business venture.

She hoped he’d remember her place in this. The enterprise they were about to start was an idea that she brought to him, after all. She was his partner this time—not just one of the girls he managed.

6.

Ground squirrels. It had to be. Or some other rodent. A parasite.

The farmer took his flashlight and poker out to the fruit and inspected the damage that had come overnight. Five of the fruit’s natural divots, each with a pin-prick-tight hole to begin with, had been eaten out, pried open. Each hole was just big enough for the flashlight’s tip to push through. The fruit’s ooze had crusted like tree sap down its side, trailing from the points of entry like sewage runoff.

He aimed the light. No vermin inside.

It took two of his tarps to wrap the thing up. Just like the treatment he gave his truck every winter, his vegetal visitor would have to be covered. He laid poison out on the perimeter, too.

Things were back to normal for a few days. On the fourth day, he discovered two more holes had been violated. The tarp was still strapped down tightly.

He drove to his uncle’s house and brought back a trail cam. He attached it to a high bough on one of the trees near the base of the pond. He took the tarp away and let the fruit be shown naked to his eye in the sky.That night, he received a notification from the cam. The gadget had taken and sent him a picture. The pictures continued to click and send as he watched the event unfold before his eyes. Two young guys—early 20s—entered the frame. They skulked around his prize. In the time it took the farmer to put on his shoes, they were rubbing their hands, arms, and legs over the whole bumpy surface of the fruit. By the time the farmer was in his driveway, the boys had taken to undressing, stroking. It took until the moment he was less than thirty yards away, screaming a decade’s worth of hell at them, before they put their stiff cocks back in their pants and high-tailed it out of there.

7.

The mail woman came while the farmer was in town, away from his fruit. That same day, she returned with her husband of 30 years to follow up on what she’d seen in his yard. From a distance, it had looked like an art project. She asked her husband, a recent retiree from the school, if the farmer had been a creative kid. No, he said. But he was a crafty liar, the ways he’d go about getting his way. I saw him in suspension when he finally got caught for sexual misconduct. He was bored of his punishment. Wouldn’t do anything but cross his arms and look at me through the window. I didn’t feel sorry for him.

Unaccompanied, the couple walked hand in hand toward the peculiarity. They stopped when they were still at a safe distance. She pulled her hand away from his and regarded the fruit from an angle. She placed her hands on opposite shoulders. He went around the other side, hands dangling uselessly. He gaped. A prickly breeze blew around the porous skin of the thing, hitting them both at separate times. A smell carried. They wrenched their noses at the pungent, salacious odor.

I don’t get it, she said. Her husband, misinterpreting her confusion, explained that it wasn’t made in an art studio. It was alive. It was grown—a natural thing.

She’d have rolled her eyes at him for the unneeded correction, but she was drawn to his conviction. Drawn to his eyes, downcast and sunken, propped up by wrinkles. He was just as stupefied as she was. With a lengthy, longing gaze, she tried to soften him up to speak his mind. He disengaged.

On the drive home, she leaned against her window and he against his, exchanging no words for the rest of the drive as they privately compared the thing in the yard to other novelties and wonders they’d been blindsided by over the years. They couldn’t decide yet if they ought to be as unsettled as they were.

8.

The farmer was putting up fence posts when his ex finally called him back. She started with questions he didn’t have the answer to: What is that thing? Where did it come from? What are you going to do with it?

He fumbled his way through the facts he had gathered and brought up a question of his own: What say you come over and see it for yourself?

She gave a sharp refusal.

He assured her: I saved it for you. I don’t trust anyone else.

Why me?

You can see how everything’s changed around here while you’re at it. It’s a good excuse to see what I did with the guest bedroom.

She was on speakerphone. He heard the voices in the background: her mom talking to her dad. Was she still living at her parents’ house? It had been months since she moved out of the farm. Last winter.

She agreed to think about it. Maybe when we’re in a better place, she said. When I’m more comfortable. I’ll think about it.

The farmer heard a shriek on the other end of the line. A tiny voice, babbling in a way that brought him glee. A baby.

Before ending the ill-considered call, she asked him why he hadn’t told anyone else about the fruit. This wasn’t something he should keep to himself.

I had plans, he said. But they changed.

He didn’t tell the whole truth: How he’d been spending valuable time preserving the fruit while being hounded by fringe types. How he’d been receiving phone calls in the night. How a deep voice kept a constant refrain: Do not—do not—get the news involved. Keep it under wraps. Keep it fresh.

9.

Having taken a week or two to consider how she’d evade his advances if he tried anything, she was finally ready to see the thing in person. She came unannounced, which wasn’t her plan, but he had stopped replying to her texts. Last time they talked, he had said to come over whenever she liked. Was now a good time? He wouldn’t answer. She hated that his avoidance coaxed her curiosity.

This wasn’t the farm she once knew. Before she could even get close, she was waved down by a man parked at an intersection of dirt roads. She ignored him—her guard was up. He was shouting into his phone seconds later. She left him in the dust.

Parking had never been a problem here until now. The farmer’s yard was full of cars. But as she scanned the windows of the house, she saw little sign of people. They were all congregated in the yard, by the pond. Young men, most of them isolated, milled around a big white tent placed near the water. Was there a family reunion today?

Her fantasies of sneaking up to the property dissolved at the sight of a convoy of trucks and sports cars. They pulled around the house to block the path of her vehicle. Out came men with hands ready at their holsters. They wore no uniforms.

She demanded to know where the farmer was. None of them could answer her.

Then a woman’s voice: What does she want with him?

The men cocked their heads, as though her answer would decide her fate.

She answered: I suppose he doesn’t matter. There’s something he had to show me. I was hoping to check it out.

The woman in charge came out of her car. Her calves were caked in mud, but her skirt was clean.

Let me show you, she said. My cousin can talk prices. We don’t get ladies often, but it’s not just gentlemen who get pleasure out of it. Not that I’m assuming what you’ve got down there.

There was a circle of death spreading from the perimeter of the tent. The grass had turned brown on the outer edges of the circle, then turned to mud at the center. It wasn’t the result of landscaping, but natural decay.

While she marveled at the degeneration, she overheard sounds coming from inside the tent. Clear. Evocative. Depraved. A flap in the tent let her see inside, briefly.

Careful not to alarm the armed men, she managed to flee without running.

10.

Last winter, she had asked him: What is a fundamental part of any partnership? Name one. Just one. We’ll go back and forth until we name enough for the two of us.

The more words they volleyed, the slower and lower his voice went. When she said trust, she thought he might catch on. She said monogamy, thinking it was on-the-nose. Then, far too late in the game, he said with defeat: loyalty. Was it even a surprise when she told him she knew? Did he figure she would never find out about his little whore?

Only a week before, they had been shopping for colors for the guest bedroom. At the time, it was slated to be their son’s room.

And now this monster in the yard. No, it’s not the same, not remotely. But that lurch in her stomach when she saw his face dawn on the word loyalty—and even after that, when he still sat confused, somehow unaware of his sins—that horrible lurch like a miscarriage of lasting respect was the feeling that returned when she saw the farmer’s treasure, his fruit, his science project, whatever role he’d imposed on it. There was no room for anything but that lurch.

Even now, wondering where he was, feeling sick that she was worried about him again, she still thought about his stupidity more than anything else. He agreed it was bad, but he hadn’t thought it was a big deal. What had he said? I’m no different than any man. It’s just part of being human. We’re adults—we can work through this. In the meantime, forgive my animal instincts.

She wondered where in evolution he saw the point at which animals learned to cheat. When had it come into being? Was it really animal? Was it even human? Was it something else of this world?

If he had found another world, mated with alien women, what then? He’d have it made. He could be as primitive as he liked. Careless. Even with six dozen bastard half-humans walking around, wailing for dad, would he be moved?

This is how it’s done on Earth, he’d say. It’s human nature. You knew what you were getting into. Love has no chance of survival in the wake of these animal instincts.

11.

Everyone else had gone for the night-turned-morning. The Skirt, her cousin, and a couple of brawny figures were all that comprised the special meeting she called. While the sun rose, the four forced their tired bodies to do the work that couldn’t wait any longer.

First, they disassembled the tent that had been erected for over a month. It was a real trick to do so. At the top, where the canopy snagged on long growths that they couldn’t see, the fabric tore.

Once the tent was down, they inspected the many holes of the eviscerated fruit. The whole thing sagged, turning the holes into slits. The tarp that they’d put on the ground around the behemoth was sticky with the juice it excreted during countless sessions with customers. Though the squad watched for signs of damage ceaselessly, they never had to swat bugs away from the juice itself. Flies only swarmed around the entry points—and the fluids deposited there. The squad refrained from cleaning the holes after they’d been spent. Only select customers even wanted a used hole, and those that did always wanted it sloppy anyway. Most came for the chance to have their way with a virgin hole. That’s what this enterprise was all about. As the squad’s stock of virgin holes sank and the word spread, the prices soared. But they were running low on things to sell.

Until now, with the four pushing against the one side, they were afraid that they had used the fruit up completely. But they rolled it over after a tremendous show of strength and teamwork and discovered more holes on the underside of the fruit. Unfortunately, most of this side was scarred and far from usable. While grass had been dying everywhere, even around the nearby wilting tree, here thick straps of crabgrass fastened the fruit to the ground. Monstrous roots stuck out of swollen anthills of flesh, inflaming the natural dimples as a result of forceful, long-term burrowing. Some of the roots were hard, riddled with sharp points like canine teeth. Others were long and soft, wagging piteously while the four members exposed it to the air. The Skirt swore she could see them recoil, sort of like worms or—more accurately—like cold, flaccid appendages. They were roots, nothing more. But while her cousin cursed, loudly exclaiming all the times he’d fucked the ugly thing, a centipede the size of a summer sausage crawled out of the ground and sucked itself into the flesh of a hole that matched its girth.

One of the men called for the others’ attention. He was inspecting the growth that had encumbered the roof of the tent. The fruit’s mushy skin gave way to a bouquet of unusual foliage bursting forth. The Skirt’s cousin immediately went white when he saw. They weren’t leaves or stems, though they resembled both in certain ways—they were a soft shade of green, bordering a creamy white, hinting at lushness yet to come. The four were less concerned with the plant-likeness of the growths as they were with the human attributes. Arms, elbows, hands, and fingers, all bunched economically together and sprouting wherever they could, stretched with all their might, clenching and flexing, raising themselves to the sun as though life depended on it.

Some of the hand-stalks were smaller than others, still growing. The biggest could engulf a human head. There were five fingers on every one—almost. A few, with two fingers instead of five, stood out from the rest. A genetic smudge, faithfully replicated from father to son. Two hooks clawing at the closest star.

12.

The farmer missed the harvest. He was at full liberty to finish the work he started, as the farmland was still in his possession. The mob had only bought the fruit from him, not the fields. His payment was more than adequate to support his decision to abandon the crops he had invested in. More importantly, he refused to bring anyone else to the farm, least of all high schoolers. Knowing what was happening, he couldn’t stand to be there himself most days.

It wasn’t the fault of the fruit. The mob had abused it and exploited it—perhaps to the purpose it was designed, perhaps not. Who was he to say what its purpose was? But he was firm in a refutable stance that it was the mob, not the fruit, who had taken the green out of the ground and poisoned the soil around his pond. Even if evidence couldn’t substantiate it, he knew there was some truth in it.

More came to light in the fall. For the first time, he saw footage online of another fruit. In the widely circulated video, the fruit’s parachute was still attached—the burnt, web-like structure that the people in his neck of the woods had spotted at the sugar factory. The family who found it had been walking through thick woodlands in northern Minnesota. There it hung from the tall, toothpick-straight pine trees like a hive. The video showed more than just the fruit. There was also a pair of winged creatures whose unfamiliar, muscular silhouettes forced spectators to stretch the definition of a bird. The animals sulked against the pale bright sky, appearing as little more than a set of black haunches and horns. The farmer thought they looked like a cross between a mountain lion and a couple different types of birds known to prey in the woodlands.

By then, the farmer was strictly off his property full-time. He needed a place to stay. With his parents separated and with no one to help around the house, his mom found nothing amiss when he offered to move back in and lend her a hand. She opened her door to him and he at once melted back into his role as the boy of the house.

While staying with her, he visited a farmer’s market abuzz with aggression. Most of the noise and congestion was around the booth of an apple vendor, who was clouded by gloom. She apologized for her unusually small supply of goods. Her apple trees had been eaten before they could even be plucked. They weren’t consumed by animals or humans, but by a strange bloated plant, a weed unlike any other on Earth. She hadn’t known what to call it until she found evidence of it elsewhere. It was a seed cluster. Wherever it fell, it merged with nearby forms of life, sucking them into itself and eventually growing new, unwarranted forms of life.

Her cluster had landed as a crater at the edge of her orchard. She hauled it away to the shelterbelt, the place where she piled up other junk, so she could conduct her work without it getting in the way. She made a mistake in not properly cleaning it off. The honeycrisps that the cluster had crushed and absorbed into its pores had helped it flourish. It took root, then the roots attacked the rest of the trees in the orchard. Like a shroud over the land, her apples shriveled and blackened. The season had hardly begun, but her crop was gone. And the cluster, which she had tried to hack up, which she had tried to burn many times, went from being her sole adversary to her sole pride of the season. As detestable as it was, it still bore her fruit. She’d have to sell what it gave her.

The vendor showed him. He touched the hard surface of what looked like the skin of a honeycrisp stretched over the gaunt jaws of a lion. She pointed out a row of black rivets along the lower edge. Careful not to touch, she said. They shun the light. I believe those are its eyes. Feel the inside, here, but do it gently. This part, just in front of that hole in the back. That’s its tongue. Don’t you see? These are its teeth.

Once it’s germinated, it’s over. It’s ruthless, resilient, selfish—it’s a living thing, fighting for survival in a new territory. It has its tricks to get the world to work in its favor, but moderation and cooperation aren’t pertinent to its survival. Not at this stage. All it knows now is how to beat out competition, eliminate predators, and test out allies and innocents as prey.

I’m here to warn you. If there’s another like it out there, unaccounted for, what will we do? It doesn’t care that we could learn to cultivate it safely. It doesn’t know anything about its own danger. It only ravishes, eating and infiltrating everything that isn’t itself.

. . .

Read this and other stories at www.zacharyhowatt.com