Radishes by Melina Bunting
Radishes
For X
You told me you’d been mucking around in the garden. Planting veggies, you said. Radishes. And I could see it: the bulbs plump and shiny, their skins a swollen reddish purple, vivid as raspberries. Their roots tapering to a fine hair like skinny rat tails – but, you know, cleaner and crisper. Anyway, you’re kneeling in the dirt, parting the soil with your fingers. I like to think you do this with your bare hands instead of wearing gardening gloves, that you enjoy the damp coolness of the earth. All is quiet, even the exhaling breeze. Or maybe you’re playing music, something that sounds like bottled summer, like sunshine flicking off the water in white hot jewels. It is always summer in this mental picture I have of you. There are flowers fermenting in the heat, sighing puffs of sultry fragrance. You have a handful of seeds in your palm. Living things in quiet stasis. You drop them into their individual plots, pat the earth around them tight. The soil gets under your nails, into the pink crevices of your hands. You in the garden. Humming all the time. A picture of peace.
