tomatoes

Jeanne has a husband, somewhere, in an insane asylum. She thinks of her grandmother, who had strawberry-colored hair until the day she died. The inside of strawberries. She was seventy-eight.
     Her husband has been there, amongst the schizophrenics, for thirty-four months. They were married just over three years ago. She does not visit him. She has never visited him.
    On the stream where she lives, there are fishermen wading across grass to get to the place, under the rock outcropping, where the fish will bite. She does not mow the lawn. She cut a path in it with garden shears and sprained her left wrist. She has a delicate bone structure and the shears, still on the bank of the stream, were still rusting the last time she went to look. There was one fisherman under the rock when she went. She nodded at him. He scratched his throat. The path she cut did not run, directly or otherwise, from her cabin to the stream. It cut a horizontal line across the clearing between stream and cabin, but began, ended, nowhere in particular.
     The marriage was annulled. There is no legal record of it. Simply that she got away doesn't mean it didn't happen. She plants flowers, in this summer, along one side of the cabin. The side away from the road. This is the shady side, and nothing grows, save some wild strawberry patches which she didn't plant. It's too shady for the plants to produce strawberries any larger than green peas.
     She would like to visit her husband, but not the other schizophrenics. She would wash the white walls of his room for him. She does not return his letters. She stands outside this winter when it snows and thinks of her grandmother, how snow would look on the interior of a strawberry. This grandmother used to harvest tomatoes, which doesn't seem right, seems an utterly hopeless act, a form of depravity.

five of her words and their definitions

offstensphspach—looks like the white undersides of shafts of rosemary which are gone as dust, or logically, green forearms reclined in want. longing for things not yet gone or dust. for green, for black, tea sprouting from fishlike underbellies of rosemary sprigs still after growing.

BN-26-75—a license plate from the unexisting or unhaloing car. lying in bed with white unstriped sheets with his hair against a white on white pillow, his bald spot on the very verge of shivering against dampening air. but it's not quite there, the baldness or broken inner part, no sense of emotion, so then the license because she wants the bald spot shivering.

yanlixchtenyit—what she sees. it is sound form the anthology of all chinese literature. also german, hence white sound. but if fried sounds and beams of light. pure anger from a bishop. or plants taken out of pots and placed into ground inthe desert. no snakes in this desert. only mites too small to chase off with blue. so mites can go unseen wherever they please. and mice. there are mice here. the antithesis of orange.

— a feeling abandoned for sound. a slack-eyed askance. your voice askew, as heard by her. if heard by him who has a baldness near to shivering, then better termed tomato. see definitions for tomato.

tomatoe—if with one e, then see her definition. if without, then read what he says about stripes of white on grey underneath an underside. it is the same thing.