Chapter 1: Crushed Tomatoes & Stolen Shoes
The BMW’s headlights cut a sterile path through the country dark. Lisa kept her hands at ten and two, the leather steering wheel cool and familiar under her palms. It was a ritual, this drive home from her bridge club, a straight shot on a road she could navigate in her sleep. The digital clock glowed 10:03. She was already picturing the kettle, the chamomile tea, the certain order of things that made a life.
The thump was soft, more of a wet crunch than an explosion. A shudder ran through the car’s frame.
“What in God’s name…” she whispered, her heart seizing. She hadn’t seen anything on the road. No deer, no possum. She pulled over, the gravel popping under her tires. The engine purred, a quiet contrast to the sudden riot in her chest.
Getting out, the night air was cool and smelled of cut grass and distant rain. She walked back, her comfortable driving shoes scuffing on the asphalt. There, just behind her rear tire, was the carnage. It wasn’t an animal. It was a plant. A sprawling, green thing, now pulped and smeared across the lane. A zucchini, maybe. Or a squash. Its innards, pale and seed-filled, glistened in the beam of her tail lights.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she muttered, a flush of embarrassment warming her neck. She’d drifted slightly, just enough to clip the edge of someone’s roadside garden.
“That was a Black Beauty.”
The voice came from the darkness, dry and cracked like old timber. Lisa jumped, clutching her chest. A figure emerged from the deep shadow of the property’s hedge. An old woman, weathered and thin, stood in a pair of mud-caked wellington boots and a canvas apron stained with earth. Her eyes, a piercing, light color in the moonlight, fixed on Lisa.
“I… I’m so terribly sorry,” Lisa stammered, gesturing weakly at the mess. “I didn’t see it. It was just so dark.”
“It’s always dark at night,” the woman said, her tone flat. She took a step closer, her boots making no sound on the soft ground. “That’s generally how it works. Name’s Anna.”
“Lisa. Lisa, I… I’ll pay for the damages, of course.” Lisa moved to retrieve her purse from the passenger seat, a solution already forming in her mind. A check. A polite, final transaction.
“Won’t do that plant much good, will it?” Anna said. She gestured with a jerk of her head. “Come on. You’re replanting it.”
Lisa blinked. “I’m… what? It’s ten o’clock at night.”
“Moon’s full. Good light for planting.” Anna turned and started walking toward the garden without another word, assuming compliance.
A strange paralysis held Lisa for a moment. This was absurd. She was a sixty-five-year-old woman in silk stockings, not a farmhand. But the sheer force of Anna’s expectation, the bizarre gravity of the situation, pulled her forward. She followed the old woman through a gap in the hedge.
The garden was a revelation. Bathed in silvery light, it was a patchwork of neat, precise rows. The air was thick with the scent of damp, living earth and the sweet, almost narcotic perfume of night-blooming flowers. It was beautiful, and the destruction she’d caused at the road felt like a gross violation.
“My purse is in the car,” Lisa said, her voice sounding small. “I can write you a check right now. A generous one.”
Anna stopped and turned slowly. A mischievous, unnerving glint lit up her eyes. “Don’t want your money.” In one swift movement, she plucked Lisa’s leather clutch from her hands where she’d been nervously holding it.
“Hey!”
“Collateral,” Anna said, tucking it into the pocket of her voluminous apron. “So you don’t scurry off.” Before Lisa could protest further, Anna’s hand, surprisingly strong, shot out and closed around her wrist. She pulled Lisa towards a small, rust-roofed shed that stood at the edge of the plot.
Inside, it was darker, smelling of peat moss and fertilizer. Anna released her wrist, then dropped into a rickety wooden chair with a sigh. She looked at Lisa’s feet.
“Get the fuck out of your shoe and sock.”
The crudity, the sheer unexpectedness of the command, left Lisa speechless. She could only stare.
“The right one,” Anna clarified, as if ordering a specific cut of meat. “The guilty one. That’s the one that was on the accelerator.”
“I will do no such thing,” Lisa finally managed, her voice tight with indignation.
Anna leaned forward, the chair creaking. The moonlight from the open door caught the sharp planes of her face. “You drove your two-ton car over my prize zucchini. You owe me. And I have a foot fetish; that’s my price.” She said it with the same matter-of-fact tone one might use to state a preference for tea over coffee.
A hysterical laugh bubbled in Lisa’s throat but died there. This wasn’t a dream. This was real. The old woman was serious. The options flashed through her mind: scream, run, call the police. But her phone was in her confiscated purse. And the thought of explaining this to anyone… the sheer humiliation of it.
Hesitantly, her fingers trembling, Lisa reached down. She slipped off her comfortable loafer, then peeled down the fine, expensive silk of her stocking. The night air was cool on her bare skin.
Anna nodded, satisfied. “Bring it here.”
Feeling utterly surreal, Lisa took a halting step forward. Anna reached out, not with gentleness, but with a practical grip, and took her bare foot, tucking it snugly under her arm. Her hand was calloused, the skin like sandpaper. Lisa stiffened, a flush of hot shame washing over her. She stared at a bag of potting soil, trying to divorce her mind from what was happening.
Anna didn’t caress it. She seemed to be… assessing it. She held it for a long, silent minute, her thumb pressed against the arch. Lisa felt the bizarre intimacy of the contact, the transfer of something she didn’t understand.
Then, as abruptly as it began, it was over. Anna released her. “Alright then.” She stood up, grabbed a trowel and a small, wilted-looking seedling from a shelf, and shoved them into Lisa’s hands. She then picked up Lisa’s single shoe and stocking. “You have to plant here. The new one. And it’s not your job to get one of your feet dirty, ha ha ha.”
The laugh was a dry, rustling sound. Anna walked out of the shed, taking Lisa’s footwear and purse with her, leaving her standing in the dark, one foot bare on the cold, packed-earth floor, clutching a trowel and a helpless little plant.
Lisa looked down at her bare foot, pale and vulnerable in the dirt. She looked at the seedling in her hand. The absurdity had hardened into a simple, stark reality. She was trapped. Taking a shaky breath, she hobbled out of the shed into the moonlight, the cool soil squishing between her toes as she looked for a place to dig.