Stephen Hundley
Radish Summer
Radishes that will burn your throat, if cut raw and chewed bloody. Radishes in crude, cold chunks
until the blade dips into the meat of the thumb. Grandfather Gary says radishes were used as currency
in Carolina well before the Charlotte mint closed. Grandfather Heath says that’s all wind.
Radishes like silver dollars, rolling at my feet, serving for soccer balls and hacky sacks and baseballs
when the buzzards sit glowering on the roof. Radishes that thud like knuckles and bones, clog rain
gutters, make the old men curse when they slide beneath their feet in the yard, the living room, out
front the glowing, black rock hearth.
I sit on my father’s lap, his shirt vibrating with a heartbeat. I tell him: your heart begins, radish sized
and hard with muscle—ends, split and sour, difficult to please. I’m just messing. Laughing with my
eyes for radishes—each the size of a Volkswagen bug.
Take me to Columbia. Take me to the county fair. We’ve grown things, monstrous strange and
innumerable. So load them up. I’m in the truck bed, just my face is peeking out. I’m thinking on
Grandfather’s father, buried in the garden, all the red fruit on Earth sprouting legs and walking off
with him, bit by bit.
Stephen Hundley is the author of The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First (University of North Georgia Press, 2021). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Cutbank, Carve, and other journals. He serves as the fiction editor for The Swamp and is a Richard Ford Fellow at the University of Mississippi.
Return to November 2020 Edition
Radishes that will burn your throat, if cut raw and chewed bloody. Radishes in crude, cold chunks
until the blade dips into the meat of the thumb. Grandfather Gary says radishes were used as currency
in Carolina well before the Charlotte mint closed. Grandfather Heath says that’s all wind.
Radishes like silver dollars, rolling at my feet, serving for soccer balls and hacky sacks and baseballs
when the buzzards sit glowering on the roof. Radishes that thud like knuckles and bones, clog rain
gutters, make the old men curse when they slide beneath their feet in the yard, the living room, out
front the glowing, black rock hearth.
I sit on my father’s lap, his shirt vibrating with a heartbeat. I tell him: your heart begins, radish sized
and hard with muscle—ends, split and sour, difficult to please. I’m just messing. Laughing with my
eyes for radishes—each the size of a Volkswagen bug.
Take me to Columbia. Take me to the county fair. We’ve grown things, monstrous strange and
innumerable. So load them up. I’m in the truck bed, just my face is peeking out. I’m thinking on
Grandfather’s father, buried in the garden, all the red fruit on Earth sprouting legs and walking off
with him, bit by bit.
Stephen Hundley is the author of The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First (University of North Georgia Press, 2021). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Cutbank, Carve, and other journals. He serves as the fiction editor for The Swamp and is a Richard Ford Fellow at the University of Mississippi.
Return to November 2020 Edition