by Beth Bosworth
Remember? We were hurtling over fields of purple cabbage and the occasional thistle bush. A trilling sound filled our ears as we roared on. Oh Mother Earth, you sang into the air: how I loved you then! At a roadblock more of these cabbages stood trilling. They weren’t cabbages but moon people with purple gullets and swaying, thistle-like organs of sight or sound. You climbed out and I followed. The moon people opened their viscous purple gullets. They may have blinked. We’re so sorry, you cried and vanished into the by-far-largest one. Several sensory organs swiveled my way. The music grew louder. What was that song? We used to sing it, Deirdre, before we got it into our heads to leave home.
Beth Bosworth is the author of three books of fiction. Her story collection, The Source of Life and Other Stories, won the 2012 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Other stories of hers have since appeared in the Kenyon Review, AGNI, Diagram, and elsewhere.
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