2023 Short Story & Essay Contest: Third Place, Adult Short Story Contest
Every day, when the sun sinks into the horizon and a chorus of night bugs starts, Elsie waters the tomatoes. I hear her leave her floor in the big house and walk down the steps outside, barefoot, to the little garden of weeds under the windowsills of our floor. In the little thicket next to the sprawling cracked concrete patio, she tenderly caresses every leaf like a mother would her child. I sneak peeks at her from the kitchen window—her quiet intensity frightens me; the ritual of the tomato watering seems like a prayer that no one would dare interrupt. I don’t speak to her, but I know her. I know the way her hair falls over her face when she leans over with a watering can, how a crease forms between her eyebrows when she pats the dirt and straightens the stick. How her life seems to depend on this ritual.
The tomato plant is easy to miss if you don’t know about its vast importance to the world. A few weeks ago, my older sister Sylvie accidentally let a wooden chair rest against the side of the house, right on the plant, and it left Elsie in tatters. She crossed herself when she saw it, lifting her golden chained cross necklace to her lips and kissing it like she was asking for forgiveness for the most unpardonable sin. I could see the fear in her eyes and the franticness in her motions as she brushed off the leaves and straightened the plant toward the sky. I drew the curtains closed, unable to bear the outpouring of emotion emitting from her face. Watching this felt like a violation of her privacy.
Life in the big house has always felt like a dance between the three of us—we only ever see the other through glass and fabric curtains. Elsie moved in four years ago, a bright northern star looking to start a new life. She was serene and steady, another body to fill the space our mother had left when she died. The house was warmer with three. Sylvie and I didn’t even know her before she came, the landlord had just decided that our rent wasn’t enough, and we needed another. So, when Elsie came, Sylvie said yes immediately. I think she wouldn’t have said yes so readily if she hadn’t been desperate for a friend though. I wasn’t enough for Sylvie, and Sylvie wasn’t enough for me. I feel bad, being older now, knowing what Sylvie gave up for me. She wasn’t meant to be a mother at 22. No one is. So, when Elsie came, and Sylvie said yes, we thought it would be the start of a new era. But the days after her arrival stretched into weeks, which stretched into months, then four years. Sylvie’s work at the hospital picked up, she was promoted, and Elsie spent most of her days shut in her room, only really coming out to water the tomatoes in summer. I continued as ever the same, alone. Elsie doesn’t know that I turned 18 yesterday or that Sylvie is spending her fourth consecutive day working at the hospital and will come home worn down to the bones. The only one with the courage to bask in Elsie’s glow is Oskar, the cat, as long as he doesn’t disturb the tomatoes.
I hear the door upstairs creak open, the susurration of skin against concrete. Outside, the sun has begun its final descent and it is time to water the tomatoes. Elsie’s silhouette whispers against the windowsill as she bends over with a watering can. I hear snaps, rustling leaves, and Elsie’s shadow stands up straight and begins to walk away.
Sylvie doesn’t do things the way I do. She’s as fascinated with Elsie as I am but draws attention to herself in a way that embarrasses me. She leaves the windows open and hums loudly, looking out every now and then to see if Elsie might be on the patio below. Her displays draw fruit flies in, not attention, and I am ashamed to think that Elsie knows my sister is desperate for her affection. I wonder why Sylvie tries, after all this time.
Once, when Sylvie was going away for two nights on a trip with her doctor friends, she’d boldly knocked on Elsie’s door and kindly asked her to feed the cat while she was gone. The fact that Sylvie had not thought for a moment to trust me with the cat’s food at the big age of 14 (and that she had seen Elsie without me and was thus intimately connected to her in a way that I was not) sent me into a white-hot fury. I spent the day crying and thinking about hitting something but then deciding not to.
Sylvie is later than usual coming home tonight. The clock now reads half past 11, the moon is high, and the crickets are chirping. Someone knocks on our door. I’m not familiar with the pattern of sound, but I know right away it’s Elsie. It could be nobody else. I open the door slowly, exhaling to steady my heartbeat. There she stands, holding out a large tomato that is the loveliest shade of orange-red I have ever seen. “Here, I want you to have this,” she tells me in halting words. I am shocked still, lips caught in nonexistent motion—these are her first words to me and now I must respond. I cup my hands together and hold them out to her like I am receiving communion. “Thank you,” I say.
Oskar appears suddenly at my legs. He’s meowing incessantly, begging someone to follow him. He leads us to the patio, toward the sacred tomato plant, and an insignificant little mouse under the weeds. Elsie laughs, and suddenly the air is electric, statically charged around us. I’m struck still for the second time that night, in a blind panic. I need to say something, something, something. “Tomatoes are actually a fruit, did you know?”
Elsie looks at me sideways, softens. “No, I didn’t. They don’t taste sweet, do they?” She asks this as if she needs my confirmation.
“No, of course not, I mean, I wouldn’t eat them with tea or anything, or put them in fruit salad, you know?” Oh my god, words won’t stop falling out of my mouth. My thoughtless tongue has betrayed me, my brain has shut down. I am aware again of the tomato gift in my palm, now sweaty. “Why not? Let’s try it with tea,” she says, laughing, and turns to go up the stairs.
I dash ahead of her, suddenly desperate to impress her. “I have tea, you can come to our floor!” I say. My face feels so hot that I wonder if I’m coming down with a fever. Inside, I boil water and pour steaming cups of chamomile for us both. At our dining room table, Elsie shines so brightly against the drab yellowed walls, the tomato she plucked from the plant vivid and glowing like struck by some divine power. It does not go with the chamomile tea at all, but still, I eat, each seed slipping down my throat, little pills of life in watery juice. We wrinkle our noses at it together. I wonder what Sylvie would think if she saw us.
In my head, I can see our mother doing the same. She boils a pot of tea, slices something like an apple in sixths. The room is warm, the table is set, and Sylvie and I are sitting on either side of her. She pets Oskar and tells us fairytales, stories of her childhood, and we are enraptured. We feel like children again; we allow her to baby us, the way she used to when Dad was still around. She stands up to refill the teapot with boiling water and tea bags, and when she falls it shatters on the floor with her, all multicolored pieces of porcelain skittering across the tiles.
At our dining room table, the floodgates are opened and Jesus has risen. Stories start to spill out of Elsie like water, as if she had been ready to burst from holding it all in. Her parents are graying and faltering; her brother is unemployed. Her career as a burgeoning artist sputtered out this year in the cold month of March, and her prospects went down the drain. The cold industrial north, where her hometown is, beckons her back with crooked fingers and lackluster promises of stability. A factory job, maybe. As she says all this, unprompted, she clutches her golden cross necklace and holds back tears.
I haven’t opened my mouth in many minutes, maybe an hour. What could I possibly say? I’ve lived a life here but done nothing at all. I make breakfast, go to school and back, do my homework, pick plums from the fruit trees down the road, and sleep. I miss Sylvie sometimes when she’s gone, and my mother always. I know some of the pain Elsie describes, and it frightens me. Sylvie would know better what to say than me, I think. But I reach out over the table anyway and pour her some more tea. Elsie is overcome with emotion at this gesture and holds my hand before I can take it back. Looking at the helplessness in her eyes, it suddenly occurs to me that Elsie may have wanted this moment all along. Sylvie and I, we always tiptoed around her, never making any effort toward her. Even though her presence filled the big house, even though Sylvie always sang in the hopes of her hearing, even though I stole glimpses of her through the window, we always held back. It occurs to me that, maybe, I could’ve given her a fruit, maybe some chamomile tea.
The last of the tomato slices are eaten, leaving a watery residue on the plate. I feel sad about it somehow. The beautiful blood-red ripeness is only a memory; I won’t be able to hold it and marvel at the gift that brought Elsie to me.
Elsie tells me one last story before she leaves. She tells the story of the tomato plant—how her mother’s friend worked at a greenhouse and saw it with its unusually beautiful tomatoes, the kind that almost glow in the dark. So enraptured was she that she took a cutting of it and gifted it to Elsie’s mother as a birthday present. Elsie’s mother cared for it for a few months and then gave it to Elsie as a moving away gift. Dutifully, she had planted it as soon as she moved into the house, expecting the southern climate to keep it alive for at least a few more weeks. Every year before it died with the first frost of autumn, she harvested the tomatoes and planted their seeds into new pots. Every summer, she planted them outside again. Through flood and snow, from autumn through spring, the plant burst with fruit, producing beautiful tomatoes one after the other. Elsie saw it as a sign. Every day that she saw the plant blooming, she tells me, she crossed herself and said a prayer. “It reminded me that someone loved me,” she said with a smile. “I think the chain of tomato gifts, from God to my mother’s friend to my mother to me, helped me realize that I wasn’t really alone in this world.”
When Elsie is about to leave, she turns to me at the door and kisses me on the cheek. “Thank you kindly for the tea. Can I ask for one more thing?”
I would give her anything, I think. She asks me to water the tomato plant while she’s gone. Those words stab the space between my ribs, and the aftermath leaves me breathless and reeling. She’s leaving. She’s tasked me with the impossible—I’m responsible for her tomatoes. I say goodbye breathlessly, forcing burning tears back. I watch her walk up the stairs to her room and vanish behind the door into the abyss. I can hardly bear to face the kitchen again, to clean up, without her.
Life after Elsie is the same as ever before, just as lonely. Sylvie came home late after Elsie had left, and the sight of two empty teacups sitting at the table struck such a fit of jealousy into her heart that she wouldn’t speak to me for days. I couldn’t look out of the window for days for fear of not seeing Elsie there. Tonight, however, is different. The air is warm and I feel the memory of her presence. Oskar is winding his way around my legs as I water the plant faithfully, overjoyed to be chosen to care for her gift. Someone loves me, I think. I pluck a glowing tomato from the stem and eat it over the balcony. Delicious sadness works its way up my throat. The tension of the thick skin breaks between my teeth.
