Two Stories
Tomato Girl
In place of my heart, an heirloom tomato. Yellow, ridged, and plump. It doesn’t beat. I lay my hand over my chest and feel nothing.
Some people speak of a fluttering sensation in the chest. A feeling associated with excitement or nerves. But this is foreign to me.
I only feel an acute heaviness, like a stone at my center.
A black-and-white image captures what is inside of me. A machine that belongs to science fiction. There are no veins, spiderwebbing out, no hidden chambers of ventricles. Just an heirloom tomato.
This makes me unique and also unacceptable.
Every time I see the scene in a movie, I feel as if someone has slipped a knife into the center of my chest. I hate that scene, where one lover lays across another, completely at ease.
What are you doing?
Listening to your heart beat.
I turn off the television, I walk out of the theater. I squeeze my eyes shut and slip my fingers in my ears.
Tomato girl. Tomato heart. Heartless.
It doesn’t change anything about me. I practice telling myself this. Like a prayer I repeat on waking. I root around for my worthiness.
At night, before sleeping, I lay my hand over my heart and am soothed by the stillness. The tomato and I are calm.
I dream someone throws a volleyball into the center of my chest and the tomato splatters, like a firework, like a balloon filled with paint, scattering juice like a soft and fleshy fruit, which is exactly what it is.
I dream I slip a palm over my chest and finally feel a sensation. That right at the end, something occurs that makes life worth living.
I wake and am still a woman with a tomato in place of her heart. I wake answerless.
I eat no tomatoes. Plums are avoided, grapes are a pass. Kumquats repulse me. I turn my nose up at anything that reminds me of myself. My diet is limited.
I lose joy. Once I sampled everything that grew in the summer. Once I went to the market, allowed myself to indulge. Once I believed I was special and worthy.
I dream of a man who holds a knife between both palms like a bouquet. I hear you have a tomato in place of your heart, he says. I would like to see.
I dream of an amorphous god, a being that has no description. I made you unlike anyone else and I left my mark; so that everyone would know you were special. I made you after me.
I dream of a flower shop where I practice arranging stems in a tall glass. People compliment the arrangements and say nothing about my heart.
I dream of a skinny green worm that appears inside the tomato. I dream of the worm getting fatter and fatter, gorging itself on my center.
I dream myself normal and wake up strange. I dream myself strange and wake up stranger still.
No doctors have ever understood me. I don’t believe any ever will. I am a case to be solved, not a confidante, a friend, a person with conversation to be shared.
Scientists wish to observe me, like an animal in a zoo. Men and women make conversation but somehow the tomato takes over.
They recognize my face from the newspaper. They know what is inside of me more intimately than I know it myself.
Language finds ways to wound me. Fingering a locket at a garage sale, the seller describes it as a family heirloom. I turn and leave on the spot.
Yellow is similarly disappointing. I feel disgusted by sunflowers, poppies, buttery petunias.
I dream I cut myself, navel to neck, in front of the mirror. But in the dream there is no tomato to discover. Only a slate gray stone.
Somehow, this is worse.
I walk a map of avoidance. I steer clear of green houses and greengrocers. I walk past hospitals as if I cannot see them. When I enter a museum, I turn my back to the still lifes.
My world becomes smaller. I use less words. Yes and no and no, thanks.
I no longer pick up the phone when it rings. I dabble in agoraphobia.
I dream there is someone else like me, someone with a tomato at their center. I dream that we meet but have nothing in common.
I dream I have a body, but no tomato. I dream I have no body, I am all tomato.
I dream my skin turns yellow, plump and ridged.
My birthday approaches. My tomato and I prepare to turn another year older.
I decide to do everything differently than I have in the past. I pull a heavy phone book onto my lap, flip through the pages.
Twisting the phone cord between my fingers, I make order after order, calling bakeries and restaurants and delis, places I have never visited.
The next day my doorbell rings and rings. I pick up each box and arrange them, one by one, on my kitchen counter like a buffet.
A cool cup of tomato gazpacho, a dripping mozzarella and tomato sandwich, red and white melding together, an aromatic curry littered with stewed tomatoes, a steaming container of thin noodles dressed in a chunky tomato sauce, a square slice of margherita pizza, a round tomato like an unblinking eye in the center.
At the very end, the crown jewel, a dense, triple-layer cake, exquisitely frosted to look like a giant tomato. I invite all my neighbors to my tomato banquet but do not offer them a bite.
I feast in front of their faces. I eat and eat, until I am completely stuffed.
My neighbors leave and I sleep soundlessly.
Life-Size
The doorbell rings, sounding different from how she remembered. Usually she anticipates all of her visitors, opening the door to greet them. Only strangers ring the bell.
She is on the floor, making a figure out of wood. First she saws, then she carves, then she files, paints, and seals. Each step essential. She likes the routine.
Doll-like in size, with minutely detailed faces. The figures are not alive but when she holds them in her hand she feels a vibrancy, like an electric current, shoot through her fingers.
She has always felt that there is something alive about her art.
She sleeps in the same space where she works. It is just one room with a set of windows in the front, and a little square of cement in the back, where she likes to sit in the summer.
For a long time, she did other things. But now, it’s mostly the figures.
She wishes she could make them exactly how she likes. But the money comes from other people. Her customers.
Sometimes, the customers send photographs and she creates a mirror of what already exists. Sometimes she creates figures that no longer exist, but that the customers wish still did. Rarely, they are drawn from nothing.
For her own sanity, she sneaks in a special touch. This helps her confirm she is not a machine.
In one figure, a fleck of gold grins back from a singular pupil. In another, she leaves her defiance in the lips, slightly more upturned on the right than the left. Once, a small, sanguine-colored streak hidden in dark hair.
The touches she includes are so subtle, nobody ever mentions them. The customers do not complain. But she feels secure knowing what she has done. She can always find a way to make the figures belong to her.
The bell rings again, but this time it sounds lower. Slower. As if the wiring has shorted, the sound playing on a half-second delay.
She lays down her project, which is still just wood, not yet alive, and goes to the door. She presses her eye to the peephole and finds a man on the other side.
She opens the door a crack, keeping her body inside her own space, drawing an invisible fence between them.
I’m here to pick up my order. His speech is very clear, as though he has rehearsed this phrase in the mirror several times before arriving.
The man is well-dressed. Tall. But there is something in the way he looks at her, not quite meeting her eyes, gazing at her body below. It makes her feel nervous.
Can I see your order number?
She keeps her voice soft, inviting, but each word builds a cage. She waits for him to step inside, so she can pull the latch closed.
She is sure that he does not have one. She ships out each order and she doesn’t have anyone scheduled for pick up. She rarely provides her address.
He reaches into one pocket, and then another. She is getting closer and closer to catching him until he pulls out a crumpled receipt.
Okay, just a moment.
Smoothing it out, the receipt looks just like the ones she provides. Her address, printed clearly at the bottom.
She closes the front door, leaves him standing on the porch. She feels an urge to slip her fingers around the jeweled lock, slide it in place behind her, but she doesn’t.
She suddenly remembers where she saw the man. It was last week. She was riding on the bus. In between her legs, a bag heavy with material. Blocks of wood and fresh paints. Two new wood chisels. Stain and sealant.
The bus was full of chatter, though she was silent. For many stops the sound continued. But as she got closer and closer to her own stop, she realized the bus was becoming emptier and emptier. And it wasn’t a conversation, it was just one voice.
Looking out the corner of her eye, she saw the man. He was in the back of the bus. He did not look disheveled like she expected. His shoes were clean. But he was yelling angrily, his voice filling the bus, as if in an imaginary argument.
She had headphones in so she couldn’t quite catch the words. There were two other people, besides her and the man. The two people were a couple, seated close together. The couple did not have headphones in. They looked at the man, and then back at each other, disturbed.
The bus doors opened and closed. No one got on.
She sat very still for the rest of the ride, as if she were made of stone. When she stepped down onto the pavement and felt the wind blow behind her, pressed out by the doors, she knew she had escaped.
The doorbell rings again, pulling her back to the present. This time it sounds shriller, more impatient.
In one corner of her place, a stack of glossy, black boxes. When she finishes a figure, she packs it carefully, each box lined with crushed velvet. The figure always sinks into the velvet, cocooned, as she lays it to rest.
She marks the order number across the bottom of each box with a chrome calligraphy pen. The numbers are not sequential. They are numbers that make sense only to her.
Her favorite age repeated three times. The cost of her groceries written backwards. The area code for each town she lived in.
Looking at the receipt in her hand, she easily finds the box within the stack, though these numbers are foreign to her. A meaningless combination.
Curious, she slides open the top. All of her creations are like children to her. Each unique and beautiful.
This one has certainly been created in her style. The shape is just like one of her figures. The wood is the same soft wood. The stain is the same stain.
But she has never seen that figure's face, except in the mirror.
The doorbell rings again but this time it sounds like a scream.
SL Carroll (she / her) is a Brooklyn-based writer and multimedia artist. Her short story ‘Vanishing Act’ won first prize in swamp pink's Crazyshorts! fiction contest in 2021 and her short film ‘Altar Ego’ was screened in 2022 at Watershed Studios (Galway, Ireland). Her debut novella, The Art of Conjuring, is forthcoming from Terrazzo Editions. She can be found online at slcarroll.com.