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  • Beta vulgaris
  • H. R. Webster (bio)

Let’s make sugar, my father said. We beganwith the garden’s blank grid, measured outrows with tape and rod, the taut demand

of thread, of wire. We tuned the flat earthbehind the old machine shed, turnedthe key toward sweetness, each fourth

row planted marigolds whose bitter punchof scent and sun set the mule deer’s velvetnoses toward other gardens, toward the plunge

of burning irrigation ditches and coyotesrubbing the night all wrong, while the beetstightened their fists around the earth’s dark throat.

Drought stepped ponderous over our sky, draggedits shimmering feet. Heat made black snakeson the road where there were none. Wet rags

around our throats, we knelt to pull two plants of threefrom every row, to pinch their green candles out.Evenings the eastern sky would bruise and preen

with heat lightning, nothing more. Thirsty,beets lose sweetness fast, grow bitteraround their lack. We went to bed still dirty,

saved our slim allotment of water for the plants.My father snapped like my finger in the slamming door.He ground clots of dirt to dust between his furious hands. [End Page 109]

Fresh fire in the foothillsand something wrong in the soil. Gravelmarked our knees when we knelt to weed. I willed

the leaves to grow past the width of my now-crooked finger.We pulled purslane, red threadedas an eyelid, thistles that dried to thick tinder

for the prairie to flint. When finally we began to ripthe beets up by their leaves, the roots were smallerthan we had hoped. We dumped their foliage, its broken ribs,

in the pasture to steam and rot,gathered their dirty knuckles in buckets,left our spades to rust in the gutted plot.

All day we sliced them thininto the heavy-bottomed pot. We added sugar, hopedthe liquid would gather at its geometry. Hoped its rim

of sweetness was enough for the beets to clingagainst. Sugar begets sugar, we prayed. Then watchedmy father fail to wring

some goodness from the dirt.The crystals that formed were too few to fillhis callused palm. We ate them for dessert;

their penny taste stayed on our tonguesfor all the years we lived with my fatherby the garden. All the years that we were young. [End Page 110]

Late that night I walked the pulpout to the edge of the prairie, past the quiverof miller moths who lingered by the motion-sensor light’s dim bulb.

I left the mush in the prairie’s gloomfor the mountain lions who waited in the cottonwoods,or the small creatures those lions would come to consume. [End Page 111]

H. R. Webster

H. R. WEBSTER holds an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, the Seattle Review, and Black Warrior Review.*

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