The Pumpkins of Fir Street

EDITOR’S NOTE: We know, we know — we said The Flytrap wouldn’t launch until Election Day. But our Kickstarter popped off so fast that we got really excited about publishing some early bonus content just to test things out. And while free subs are technically available here on Beehiiv, our Kickstarter has the hottest deals, and we extremely encourage folks to pledge + subscribe over there for now.

Flytrap Fridays will run here on the blog, free for everyone to read, until Election Day. Think of it as a little ~ amuse bouche ~ for the Flytrap-curious. In upcoming editions, we’ll be rewatching “Roseanne,” getting naughty with female villains, appreciating the freaky feminism of CBS’ “Evil,” and unpacking why evangelicals love to hate Halloween. But first: an autumnal tale from Flytrap co-founder s.e. smith.

Content note: this story contains elements of gore and body horror. If that’s not your thing, Flytrap Fridays will be back next week with something entirely different.

It was a sunny summer day when we moved into the house on Fir Street. Even then, on that first day before … everything … the plants in the overgrown garden seemed to move of their own accord. Swayed to the tune of a different breeze than the one playing with our hair as we slogged back and forth from the U-Haul. 

My wife picked the house. She liked it because of the Victorian architecture, racing from room to room exclaiming about built-ins and running her hands along the wainscoting, the realtor chirping about the newly-installed washer and dryer, the fresh flooring in the mud room. The established garden, with squash vines and corn stalks already firmly rooted, reminded her of the small backyard garden at our old house in Cincinnati, and since I was indifferent to where I lived, as long as there was a roof and four walls, I consented. The realtor assured us that the house was a "real charmer," and that we were "lucky to get it." I wondered who planted the seeds and then abandoned them, how the garden was so fecund instead of wilting in the summer heat. 

The neighbors eyed us curiously as we carried our belongings up the path, wrestling with mattresses and heavily-laden boxes of books. Periodically they drifted over to say hello, sometimes helping to bring a lamp inside or steadying an imbalanced box as an excuse to look inside. The house, we learned, had been shrouded in closed curtains and blinds for months.

It didn't take long for us to get the story. The neighbors practically stumbled over themselves to tell us about the house and its former gardener. He had left suddenly, after his wife disappeared without a trace. It was a big story in this sleepy little town, a “Top Ten Small Towns in America” kind of place where the small, thirty-bed hospital had lured my wife with the promise of the slow life. The neighbors told us the gardener had stuck it out for a month or so, but everything in the house reminded him of his wife, so he left, moved to another city far away. The house began to slowly settle into the ground while the garden ran riot, the property’s status unclear for months before the real estate sign went up in the yard. 

Some of the neighbors told us they thought the disappearance of the wife was fishy, that there was more to the story than the husband had told them, or the local cops. He said he woke up one morning and she was gone, her half of the closet emptied out and her car missing from the driveway. No note, no call, no nothing, her house keys lying on the table where she always left them after coming home at night. She'd been taken into the witness protection program, one person said, though they couldn’t say why. Another said that the couple hadn't been happy, had fought bitterly, even on the last night that she was seen. Yet another swore that they’d seen her getting into her car with someone, their features shadowed by a baseball cap, someone who put a hand on her shoulder in a way that was more than friendly. My wife asked who had cared for the unusually thriving garden after the house had become empty — she wanted to thank them — but no one could say.

The day we moved in, my wife watered the garden deeply at dusk, barefoot in her torn jeans, humming to herself, wriggling her toes in the dirt. The earth lapped at her feet, thick and sticky, even clotted,  clinging to the undersides of her nails. The stems of the plants were fleshy, almost quivering with life. I thought I could sense a faint pulse, and I almost said something, but what do you say? Darling, do the plants seem…alive…to you? 

Like all old houses, the house on Fir Street had its problems. It creaked and groaned in the night as it settled, and the pipes clanked. Part of the porch was rotted out and would need to be replaced, but the garden flourished, the plants growing big and lush, almost comically oversized, crowding out anything else we tried to seed. And my wife was happy there, in the house, the garden, the town, getting to know the neighbors, who were friendly, decent people, with cats in their windows and little projects to do on the weekends. I commented one night that there was something a little … Stepford Wives about the whole place. My wife laughed, telling me I was too used to city life as she flipped through a cookbook looking for something to make for the night shift nurses out of all our backyard bounty.

While she turned outward, I found myself roaming the house in search of the origins of its strange noises and shudderings, finding all its small, hidden places. On the third floor, which was gloomy and dusty with disuse — my wife had big plans for children to fill that floor — I found a box of old photographs of the house, none recent, a time lapse of additions and re-roofings, trees growing and falling and growing again. My wife liked some of them enough to get them framed and hang them in the hall. I wondered what the gardener and his wife had looked like, the couple that had lived here before us, if they were related to any of the people in the photos dressed in a succession of vintage clothing before cutting to what looked to me like the mid-’90s. Sometimes it felt as though someone was looking out at me through the frames, their breath clouding the glass, with each glance their teeth a little sharper than last time I looked. 

Looking back on it, I can’t pinpoint the exact moment the house started making me uneasy. It might have been August.Those Victorian Gothic moldings, which looked so bold in the July sun, looked almost malevolent on the first foggy almost-fall day, and I realized that the Cypress trees along the property line to the south shaded much of the house, making it dark, damp, and gloomy, water dripping from their branches. My wife suggested repainting the walls in warmer colors, adding bright rugs, but they didn’t dispel the gloom I felt settling around me. Rustlings in the walls made me fear mice had moved in with us, and the cracking of the floors led me to beg the contractor for a repeat visit to check the joists again. Three, maybe four plumbers couldn’t find anything in the pipes, muttering things about “expansion” and “repipe” that sounded expensive, and since nothing was leaking, I gave up. Sometimes, doors I thought I left shut were wide open, and other times, I couldn't close a door at all. 

"Happens a lot in these old houses," the contractor told me. "Frame swells right up. We can shave it down for you." But then the hinges started giving way and shrieking, sending me bolt upright the first time the door to the bedroom creaked open in the night. The same contractor replaced the lock on the front door after it kept popping open: “These old locks fail all the time, you know,” he assured us. He insulated the pipes to muffle the clanking, but it continued, though sometimes my wife insisted that she couldn’t hear it, that my brain was making things up, translating even the smallest disturbances into monsters in the night. My wife believed in only what she could touch and feel, not little noises that existed in corners of rooms and dreams. 

I found the ring while trying to fix the hinges to the bedroom door myself, battling with inadequate tools and splinters. It was wedged into a doorsill that I could have sworn wasn’t there before, metal gleaming when the light of the setting sun hit it just so. There were traces of an inscription on the band, too faded to read, and a deep slash across the metal with ragged edges that looked like an open wound. The mark could have come from anywhere, but I had a vision of the wearer flinging up a hand in self-defense. The ring felt heavier than it should have, and somehow it found its way into my pocket. I turned it over in my fingers as I wandered from room to room, the house’s endless noises making it impossible for me to think, the feeling of a second pulse, a beating heart somewhere out there in that endlessly sprawling garden, gnawing at my mind. 

The neighbor's dog kept getting around the fence somehow and digging in the backyard, leaving oozing, upturned clumps of dirt dark with compost, which attracted the crows. My wife put up a scarecrow in the corn to frighten them away, but they just settled on its arms, cackling to themselves like a gang of juvenile delinquents. Even with the crows to pick at its produce, the garden kept growing, the pumpkin vines putting out big bold flowers and the last of the tomatoes swelling and bursting on their trellis.

My wife didn't notice anything strange in the garden, that strangely lush garden with its mammoth vegetables. She just cheerfully harvested them and served them at dinner. I found myself not wanting to eat, choking on the sharp green smell of zucchini, the brittle snap of beans that sounded like shattering bone, nauseated by the glistening sheen of oil across the juicy tomatoes of endless caprese salads. She took the leftovers to the hospital, finishing them on her breaks, where their juices stained her scrub tops, impossible to wash out. Like the garden, it seemed to me that she was growing strangely large — hale and hearty, the curves of her hips firmer under my fingers, her hair thicker and more lush, but she wore the same clothes as always, and inhabited a body that was glowing and strong, even as mine was dimming, hair dull, skin ashy. 

One September night, alone in the kitchen, I looked out the window and saw a tall woman sitting in the garden, looking at the last of the beets, back turned to me, long dark hair in a braid. I leaned close to the window, fearing her, fascinated by her, but at the shift of the floorboards under my feet, she vanished. My wife found me there at the window when she got home, said I was imagining things when I told her about the vanishing woman in the garden, her head cocked with concern as I tried to describe her.The next morning, when I went to go shoo away the crows, I found footprints filled with water in the thick soil. 

It felt like part of me had vanished with this woman, whoever she was. I started losing things. House keys, my favorite socks, my morning coffee mug still half-full. My wife thought I was being absent-minded, told me I was letting the old house sounds get to me, that every creak and groan carried outsized weight, that my disturbed sleep was making me lose my grip. The crows were just crows, the garden just a garden. She told me I should take advantage of the lingering nice days and go outside, make friends with the neighbors like she had. But to me, the house felt like an inescapable gyre, the vines of the garden scratching at the windows to be let in, the smell of dirt haunting me when I tossed and turned in the unseasonable fall heat at night, but by day, I couldn’t bring myself to leave. 

The pumpkins grew and grew, developing blood-like splotches on their swollen rinds, and the neighborhood children peered over the fence every day in awe at their strangeness. The house creaked and groaned during the day now too, not just at night, and my wife got testy whenever I mentioned the dark, vanishing woman, even as she appeared in my dreams, so vivid that I almost felt the ghost of her hand on mine, felt her breath on my cheek when I woke. I started avoiding the third floor altogether, because I thought I heard voices and whispers there.

My wife volunteered the pumpkins for the neighborhood block party in late October, and I jumped at the chance to be rid of them. The neighbors helped us hack through the sighing vines to stack the pumpkins on the sidewalk, where they glowed ominously against sheets of newspaper spread flat across the concrete, their stems dripping sticky sap that smelled like copper and dirt, brittle and sharp. The sap was strangely dark, but if anyone else noticed, they didn’t say so. No one else seemed to hear the sap beating like a heart in the severed stems, which oozed dark liquid like blood.

Wind swirled through the trees, picking up leaves and scattering them across the crowd, adults chattering and drinking beer from the coolers that had sprouted on every porch, dripping with condensation, the sharp snap of bottle caps popping off and releasing the acrid smell of hops. The children swirled around the pumpkins, picking out their favorites, screeching, filling the street with shouting and laughter. Sharp knives seemed to be everywhere, even in the smallest of hands. I sat on a lawn chair, nodding and smiling politely even as I felt overwhelmed by the noise, a feeling of dread creeping up my spine. Neighbors politely inquired about how we were settling in, how we’d grown such fearsome pumpkins, but I could only offer terse responses as my fingers toyed with the ring that I’d kept since that day battling the bedroom door. I transferred it furtively from pocket to pocket, not wanting to explain it to my wife. As the sun set, someone dragged out an apple press, and the sharp, sweet scent of apples joined the fray, a pile of pomace attracting the interest of crows who picked over it like thrift store shoppers searching for a bargain, scattering up in flight and swirling back again every time someone half-heartedly tried to shoo them off. 

The chattering of the children and the music from the impromptu band was so loud that I didn't hear the first scream. No one did. But soon we were all screaming as the children lifted the tops off their pumpkins: inside of each was a piece of her, the vanishing woman from the garden, from my dreams. There was her throbbing heart, her right hand with fingers writhing blindly, her clumsily sectioned legs and feet and, most horrifying of all, her head, the eyeballs gouged out of their sockets and hanging limply against her cheeks, glazed over in death. Her teeth snapped at the fingers of the little girl who had sunk her hand into the pumpkin expecting seeds and finding, instead, unyielding but hungry bone. 

I had a flash of her, the vanishing woman, as she might have been when she was clinging to the last throes of life: her eyes gaping and her bloody throat frothing and bubbling as she tried to form a sentence. My gory reverie could only have lasted moments, and when I emerged the whole street was one endless scream, the grating shrieks of happy children turned sour and shrill, the crows aloft in a whirl of wings and feathers.

The gore was everywhere, the miasma of tendon and muscle and pieces of her drowning out the earthy smell of the pumpkins. The sheer volume of her was greater than the pumpkins should have contained, more than any one human, and every piece and part dripped and stank, her brain turned to oozing jelly and her skin sloughing off in foul shreds. The pumpkins collapsed in on themselves in lurching, squelching mounds of suddenly rotten flesh, the parts of her writhing towards each other, tearing the sodden newsprint. 

The neighborhood children looked like ghoulish slashers as they fought the tide of her, holding carving knives against the blood and flesh and bone whose abattoir stench worked its way into our eyes and noses and mouths, our clothes stained by streaks of fat and clots of blood. The adults, half-drunk on beer and high spirits, reeled uncomprehendingly through the scene. The pieces of her were undeterred, alive with movement, searching. A single hand — her left hand, I realized, the dread from earlier making my hair stand on end — wriggled its way out of the mass and toward me, undulating across our lawn, index finger raised as though it had something to say. 

There was a certain inevitability to it.

I had seen that hand on mine so many times in my dreams, but her fingers now were cracked and broken, stained yellow and orange and dark brown, dirt embedded in the whorls of her fingertips. Any nail polish she might have once worn was long gone. The flesh was bloated, discolored and cracking. My wife took one step back and then two as the hand dragged itself to my feet and I found myself unwillingly bending to meet it, reaching out with my own. For a moment our fingers intertwined and I closed my eyes, willing the swollen flesh to feel like an ordinary hand, cool and dry in my grasp. 

Something shifted inside of me then, caught between the living and the dead, and I reached my free hand into my pocket, where the familiar marred curve of the ring felt larger than life, solid. 

My wife took a sharp breath that cut through the sound of children’s screams, a hissing, sibilant noise that made the hand rear back, threatened, grasping until it found a fallen carving knife and began its relentless approach again. My wife, in a rare burst of violence, stepped on it, trapping the meat of the hand under her boot with a violent crack. It loosened its grip on the knife, fingers scrabbling for purchase along the edge of the sole of the boot, and I took that moment of distraction to slide the ring over its finger, forcing it over her knuckles, feeling her fingers spasm against mine, briefly. The struggle could have taken ages or minutes before her hand went still, satisfied, all the parts and pieces of her slumping to a halt.

In the sudden, bloody quiet, dusk crept over our street, still dotted with cheerful fairy lights. I sensed the house go silent for the first time, like any other house on the street, its garden wilting and withering rapidly in the chilly autumn air. Apples wizened on the branches of the trees, and the vines, the vines, the clambering vines, yellowed and crumbling, fell away from the sides of the house. The frenzy of violence felt like a dream, the specter of the vanishing woman having made her final cry in death. Whatever grip she had on this place, these people, slackened, like the fingers of the open hand that lay before me, fingers outstretched. 

It was only later, much later, after the police and the medical examiner had come and gone, after the house and garden were sealed, after the neighbors had assured themselves that they always suspected something, after the traumatized children had been sent home to drink hot cocoa and tell themselves it was all a dream, after my wife had fallen asleep in my arms in the guest room of the mail carrier who lived next door, that I heard the softest of sounds in the night, and carefully extricated myself from the lumpy bed, drawn to the window, and leaned my forehead against the cool glass. 

At first, I thought the figure in our living room was one of the evidence technicians, but she was too tall — stretched, almost — and her hair hung loose, the phantom crimps of an untangled braid still visible, as she turned to face me, putting her palms against the glass. I felt, suddenly, the weight of the ring in my pocket.

This piece was edited by Andrea Grimes and copy-edited by Nicole Froio.

… oh, and here’s that Kickstarter link again. Remember: while free subs are technically available here on Beehiiv, our Kickstsarter has the hottest deals. We extremely encourage folks to pledge + subscribe over there for now.