The Pygmy Giant

by Jude Cowan Montague

The best vegetables in the microcosm were grown on John Smith’s allotment by his fiancée Meg. She fondled the sprouts and stroked Jerusalem artichokes teasing enthusiasm up through the roots. She could make water last twice as long before it evaporated, each drop straining its utmost to moisten her land and fatten her efforts before losing its identity and returning to heaven where it could no longer feel her delicious nearness. Billiken’s Garden show was coming up and she would enter her prize achievement, the mighty strawberries of death, juicy with the blood of those who had died in the graveyard opposite. A film of her unorthodox techniques was already stored in a suitcase in the local church vestry where she sang her hymns to parsnips in Tuesday choir. For reasons best known to his brother’s banker, the squire won first prize. Meg ran up, and took her celluloid to the local cinema where she flopped in the back row, scoffing berries and parsnips by the tub and mumbling, potato nostra.

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Jude Cowan Montague lives in London, is a composer, writer and an experimental printmaker. In fact, most things she does, she does experimentally.