The Blinding in Horticulture, Texas
This piece was retrieved from an old archive of my online writing—there will likely be some rough edges!
I have a new story, “The Blinding in Horticulture, Texas,” up in Fringe Magazine as of Monday morning. Although it’s quite sad to hear that Fringe is shutting down publication this summer, I’m happy to be one of the last writers they feature on the site, and, in a way, help them say “goodbye” to the literary community.
Lev is a recluse living in a one-man town of Horticulture, Texas when he finds a girl in his portion of the desert. He doesn’t know why she’s there, or where she came from. He suffers from a blinding, which takes his memory without guilt. The story begins:
Lev has a desert for a backyard, and it has always been empty except for the morning he finds the little girl sitting in the sand. A dune is rising up along the west-facing side of her body. She is a few hundred feet from his home, and there are no footprints delineating from where she came. He tells her if he hadn’t found her, she would have become nothing more than another frozen dune by tomorrow morning. She looks about seven or eight, with deep black holes for eyes. He lets her climb onto him piggyback and takes her into his cabin—600 square feet he had built himself on the flat basin of his own personal Texas desert.
He sits her down and turns on the TV so she’s occupied, hands her a half-filled can of Coke that’s gone flat. He fixes her a bowl of Cheerios and watches her devour them quickly, as though she hasn’t eaten in a week. She doesn’t say much, and keeps peering out the window, to the vague dirt road, as though she’s expecting someone. She looks healthy enough, but it’s hard to say. He’s never looked after a little girl before. He doesn’t know what to do—he’s just a man who restores old cars and sells them to rich men for a living—and he can only do that because there’s never a question of what to do once the blinding hits, what to do next
Go on and read it, will you?