—I KEEP HOLDING ONTO YESTERDAY 

 

Zucchini

My mother was a beauty, and she must have known him very well, the hardware store owner who let my brother and I sit with a full wagon, calling out, “Zucchini! Zucchini, ten cents each!” The vegetables we’d let grown, huge in the shape of bicycle handlebars, splayed there like organs removed from a body. 

Some bought, some pitied us with skittish eyes and some called us liars—“What’s this? That’s not a real zucchini.”  We usually made enough to pay Mom for gas money and a little extra for sodas and gum to enjoy while we played with the squirt guns we stole from the hardwood store, shooting the owner dead over and over in our back yard, with the warning, “Don’t you fucking touch her again, you bastard.”