There was a ‘sore thumb’ look about Sloane’s house, situated on a block of tastefully decorated homes. It wasn’t the shrubbery or the grass, both manicured by paid help that came and went every Tuesday morning, or the color of the garage door, which had gone through sixteen different swatches before they’d settled on an inoffensive slate blue. No, it was the lack of seasonal décor; the apparant middle finger to the entire street. Driven less by the need to appease her neighbors and moreso for the purpose of avoiding pissing off more people, Sloane scheduled her afternoon to visit a local farm’s pumpkin patch.
Presented with the option to simply select a pre-picked jack-o’-lantern from the booth by the road or venture in and select her own, Sloane decided to embrace whatever small town autumnal joie de vivre the farm was offering and put her boots to the test by wandering through the muddy field. She had been wandering for nearly twenty minutes when she came upon what appeared to be a perfectly-round pumpkin and bent down to retrieve it ⏤ only to discover when she turned it over in her hands that there was a smaller gourd growing out of it, its color already turned necrotic, black. Shaken, she immediately dropped it, watching with a loud huff of air as it exploded at her feet, fibrous guts and seeds splashing all over her boots. “Oh, fuck me,” she hissed under her breath, her gaze only lifting when she noticed motion out of the corner of her eye. Another customer, standing a mere ten feet away, witness to the whole display. “I’ll, uh… pay for it. Promise.”
Noemi was a woman that knew how to mind her business, a quality she felt most people lacked. She had every intention of letting her brown almond eyes take in the scene and simply walking away from it; but when she was spoken to, she wasn’t going to be rude and ignore “Honestly ... It’s none of my business” She shrugged ready to look away and carry on but seeing the black on the pumpkin made her look twice “Wait.. is that rotten? ... Honey I say leave it like that”
