The pumpkin had grown bigger than anyone imagined. At first it was a joke, seeing how large it was becoming, then it was marvelous, then it was incredible. Almost scary. Mary was a little bit frightened of how large the pumpkin had grown, it made her uncomfortable about reality, and how her expectations of scale and such could be broken by something as simple as the size of a pumpkin growing in the patch behind Ginny’s Victorian farmhouse. She was not wrong to be frightened of it, for it was a mutant - hybridized with alien DNA that had fallen to Earth on a meteor that was, in fact, a chunk of a destroyed world. The native life forms were scattered when it crashed, and one strand merged with the pumpkin as it sprouted.
Not only was it large, inside it was churning with activity, a heat-generating surge of pulsing pumpkin guts. One overly warm October day, the townspeople had gathered to observe the giant pumpkin and figure out what to do with it. Mary was standing further back from the crowd, and saw the whole thing, saw her fears realized. The heat, they figured out later, had made the insides nearly molten with activity and at a certain point, the thing just burst. The force of the explosion was such that the pieces of the shell broke bones in three people and one large piece fully decapitated Sarah Sargent of the garden club. Her blonde hair went flying as her head arced into the sky, a look of surprised terror in her eyes, blood spurting out from her empty neck. Mary couldn’t even scream, her mouth was just agape, and the surging, scalding pumpkin guts hit next, searing the skin off of Officer Milton and giving all-over third-degree burns to little Michael Corey and Billie Milligan. Janice Milligan almost abandoned her child when she saw how disfigured it had become. Mary was far enough away that the few pieces that did come near her or hit her were small and had no velocity behind them, but she sure did know to trust herself when she felt wrong about something, even something as innocuous seeming as a giant pumpkin.
October 14, 2022