The Radish Baby by Caragh Medlicott

A perfect baby, that’s what I thought the first time I held him. Pink like cotton candy, ogling wet cow eyes, the nose wrinkling above a bright cherry mouth. I took him home, my overgrown radish baby. I felt like the winner at a country fair; proud as punch, happy as Larry. Months of graft and here he was, unearthed, at once small and bountiful.

I called him Adam like the first man. And he was my first man, the first true one. When he quietened in my arms, when his prune lips fell into a sleeping O, my heart gushed like April rain – I was watering the dandelions, nourishing the wallflowers.

I had a barn and we lived in it. The planks were rust red, the edges piped white like wedding cake icing – horse ghosts galloped over the floor, but we didn’t mind a bit. It was fall then, the end of harvest season. The fields were ploughed, the skies thick and yellow; I watched the leaves shivering golden rust in the breeze, the air laden misty with woodsmoke.

We were safe for a while, me and my radish baby. I’d been saving season after season, twelve gilded coins weighted my pocket down, each one I kept fixed for our future. I heard wolves in the night, prowling for sheep and chickens. Owls hoot-hooted in the wee hours. In the mornings, I’d wake to sunlight shooting through the barn cracks, a glint like the shine on a butcher’s cleaver.

I could teach him everything. Show him how to write his name – ADAM – blocky, spidery, his tongue lolling out uncertain. Adam. The first mirror he’d ever see. We’d do painting, big swooping pictures on huge white canvases. When he could walk we’d go blackberry picking, taking off without water, our paper mouths thirsty for sun-sweet juice. On weekends we’d dance. Dust off the old record player, sing and sway to the old twanging songs: And no one could change my mind, but Mama tried.

Barn Christmases were all to come, the wind blowing purple and the snow breaking silver in the moonlight. The nights would be bitter, but it’d be okay, I’d have just the thing; a smoking bonfire out front, a fragrant pine tree lit up yellow. Adam, how you’ll love huge marshmallows that barely fit in your mouth. Toasted crisp, all gooey on the inside – yes, we’ll burn the first few, but it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.

I dreamed every day away. Nursing Adam rosy, bubbling porridge for breakfast – I was at once contented and itching for the future. Then the rats came. Their bodies grey and their faces snarling. I saw pink tails snaking round barn corners. They ate all our bread, chewed through our earth-covered vegetables. It was me, my fault. I’d been meaning to fix it. The barn’s rotten wood, bleeding termites like a pus-wound.

Adam was always crying then. I often was too. In the evenings I’d lift our spirits, say that we’d fix it soon, very soon. But the rats were getting spiteful and I had to hold my baby at all times. Once I left Adam in his crib, got down on my knees to check the wood and my neck snapped back at Adam’s sudden pig squeal. A rat on the crib edge peering jealously at my baby’s cotton candy face.

Mice came in January, shuddering wet from the cold. We watched them die of starvation till the rats ate them too, growing big and hard like farmers of yore. I made weak watery stews, slept with a potato sack in one arm and Adam in the other. At least there was still my milk, and we had the twelve gold coins waiting for better days. The future kept its possibility. At night, I could no longer hear the horse ghosts – had they left the barn for good? Were they ever there to begin with?

The man came in May. He had a green plaid shirt with brown splintering teeth. In need of some help, barn lady? His voice shook me. My barn is full of holes, I told him. He nodded sadly. What I wanted was nourishment, what I needed was sanctuary. I offered one gold coin for him to bring us food and rat poison, he said that for two he’d mend up my barn for good. My mind stuttered. Just the food and poison please, Sir.

By June, things were getting better. The rats were dead or dying, I carried them out by their detestable tails, threw them in a ditch and spit my disdain. I’d secured months of flour and grain, plus six clucking chickens for my old outside pen.

I baked cratered moon soda bread, ate canary yellow eggs for breakfast. Scorching August brought fire, breaking out in the trees and burning the barns huddled nearby. Sheep died, mules brayed. I prayed at night for my radish baby. As the flames slanted closer, a fresh fall of rain fizzled the fire out. Fortune was with us. Our red and white barn would never kneel, its outline a silhouette on the navy-blue sky, the night’s cloak stitched white with fifty brilliant stars.

It was the wolves next. Snatching a chicken through a gap in the hut wire – I’d been meaning to fix it, I had, I had, I really had. Adam was getting bigger, I didn’t have time to rewire the pen so the girls came inside to live with us and they squawked and clucked all night long. Soon their eggs were coming out black like burnt toast, their feathers shedding, chicken shit covered every inch of the floorboards. I don’t know how it happened, one day the gap was small, the next it was larger, but the chickens – gone scrawny – escaped out into the delighted jaws of roaming wolves circling our barn like sharks round a whale carcass.

The man came again, he said it might have been the termites – the chickens pecked the wood – they were sick, they would have died anyway. I can fix up your barn up good, I can scoop out this here rotten wood. But he was seeing double if he thought I’d give two gold coins away. I asked for red meat instead of chickens, rugs to hang over the holes in the barn. I paid another coin.

We decked the barn with silver meat hooks. The timing was good. Adam was starting to eat solids and chicken would have been dry and chewy. I diced bits of bloody beef, stewed them soft with potatoes then fed them to Adam while we giggled at his gravy chin. The meat helped me grow stronger; I’d beaten the rats, avoided the fires, seen off the chickens, we could do it all – and one day, when Adam was grown, we’d have ten gold coins to make life special, to make life safe.

But we weren’t the only ones feasting. Drafts reigned as planks dissolved. The wood shuddered and groaned in the midnight wind, the termites whisp-whisp-whispering. The man kept offering to rebuild, but his prices were going up by the day and I was fixin’ to it, I really was. We can hold out, can’t we radish baby? Each time I asked, Adam smiled wide in pink gum agreement.

His first birthday moved in. The year slipped by. My radish baby would soon be a radish boy – how I’d make a world for him with those patient gold coins. I waited up to see it in, the midnight clangs – the twelve months since he came to me, fully formed, rounded radish head. Fall had returned greyer than the year before. The ground black instead of umber; the fallen leaves were sticking muddy to the wet slopping ground.

I’d never thought about the bears. About the dangling meat. I saw her in the morning through the upstairs window, fur slick as black oil, eyes cold like December stones. Shh, Adam, shh. Hot breath huffed out her snout, a muted rumbling – the muscled motor in an insulated gut. When bears kill deer, the deer scream like children. She moved her bulk towards our red and white oasis – where else, where else?

The plan came as instinct: throw her the meat, let her win, get her out. The barn was gaping. The rugs flapped in the wind. I kissed my sweet, cooing radish baby – placed him gently down, skipped down the ladder and took the floorboards sparrow-footed. Adam whimpered from above, the bear’s rustling was loud and close. She bashed in, blasting through, a boulder falling from a mountain top. She filled every corner; smell, teeth, breath, fur, growls – after me, she was after me.

I ran for the meat, trying with damp hands to tear it from the metal where it clung like dead rabbit skin. It slipped off as she charged me, my bones going loose and crunching – twigs in a sack. I saw spots, I saw teeth. Everything was warm and I could hear my screaming in a distant ravine. Claws mauled my shoulder, more of those faraway cries – I felt a pop from the inside; a body cog come loose. The pain was subsiding, I saw black. My mind fell away, my last thought bobbed in the air: God, save my radish baby.

It was the man who found us. The birds were singing sweet as cinnamon, the sky a cloudless blue, the sun so bright it stung my eyelids a scorched pink. My blood had soaked through the floor, life dripping onto the dead grass below. It’d been hours, it’d been days. The man bandaged up my arm, took wailing Adam down the ladder, set him by my chest as I lay fading. Sweet radish baby, sweet Adam boy, I whispered. The wet blood was cold, the dry blood was matted and Adam – soft baby – was warm, warm, warm.

Time moved through me, I still had hope. In my mind was a vision: the barn fully mended, whole as the moon; there’d be a fence for protection, a vegetable patch for use. We’d lock out the rats, scare off the wolves, shoot down the bears. Our home would be safe, the future could be now. And as life let go of me, setting me gently down, I whispered to the grim about all the things that might have been if we’d had world enough and dime.

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Caragh Medlicott is a freelance writer and Senior Editor of Wales Arts Review. After graduating with a First-Class Honours degree in English Literature and an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University she began a full-time writing career in Cardiff. Recent short stories have appeared in East of the Web, The Cardiff Review, Parthian’s Cheval 12 anthology and Bandit Fiction. She was shortlisted for the Lunate 500 award in December 2020.

Twitter: @CaraghMedlicott