In Short – Volume 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)
May 31, 2024
In the Garden
By Elena Zhang
In the garden, you pluck tomatoes off the vine, your tiny fingers hummingbird fast, snatching only the green ones, a globe of youth small enough to fit in your whole palm. In the garden, you drive a plastic excavator in the dirt, scooping up wood chips to make a fragile mountain, and there are always treasures waiting for me in your pink dump truck: a violet moonflower, a shishito pepper, a large rock. In the garden, you find hidden raspberries among thorns; you find roly poly bugs, worms, and caterpillars underneath flowerpots; you find a bunny nibbling on leaves; and you sit down in the grass to watch it all enfold silently from a distance. In the garden, you sing out your first word at last, dig, but I already knew there was so much earth in you to uncover.
Elena Zhang (she/her) is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, The Citron Review, Ghost Parachute, Exposition Review, Your Impossible Voice, and Lost Balloon, among other publications, and has been selected for Best Microfiction 2024. She’s on Twitter @ezhang77.