A Tomato that Used to Be a Boy

No one quite knew how it happened, or when, but this tomato used to be a boy, they were sure of it. The mum, the dad, the two sisters, they were all positive one morning that one of the tomatoes in the fridge (a specific one, not any old one) was a member of their family somehow, or had been. This was obviously a little concerning because tomatoes rot fairly quickly! Would the tomato turn back into a boy, and if so would it be the same boy they had an odd feeling they were now missing? If not a boy, might it turn into something else, a piano, a ladle, a rabbit? They couldn’t freeze the tomato either, since if you freeze them they are mushy when they thaw, as everyone knows, and the family certainly didn’t wish to awake to a mushy brother in their freezer at some future point. At this point another point dawned on them: no matter what they did with the tomato that used to be a boy (keep it in the fridge, put it in the freezer, plant it in the garden), if it ever did turn back into a boy there would be a body to deal with. While they missed the missing boy they all felt had been the tomato before it was a tomato, they all agreed that having a body on their hands wouldn’t brighten the situation for anyone. They cut the tomato into four and ate it. 

Anna Genevieve Winham writes at the crossroads of science and the sublime, cyborgs and the surreal. She is Ninth Letter's 2020 literary award winner in Literary Nonfiction, Writer Advice Flash Fiction Contest's 2020 3rd place winner, and was long-listed for the Penrose Poetry Prize 2020. Anna serves as the Prose Editor for Passengers Journal, and she writes and performs with the Poetry Society of New York. You can find her poetry in Q/A Poetry, Panoplyzine, Meniscus, Breadcrumbs Magazine, and others. Her prose appears or is forthcoming in Tilde~, Oxford Public Philosophy, Rock & Sling, Paragraph, Gold Man Review, Meetinghouse Magazine, and Passengers Journal. While attending Dartmouth College (which was the pits), she won the Stanley Prize for experimental essay and the Kaminsky Family Fund Award.