The Great Pumpkin

It’s almost funny. Everyone worried about the bees. And here it’s the pumpkins that are going to get us. 

   The 2021 Blight struck one hundred percent of the World’s living pumpkin vines. All of them. Wiped out. Dead. Withered. The pumpkins deflating so fast they couldn’t be gathered from the fields. 

   There were some Mennonite growers, real Orthodox backwoods no-power-having types, who managed to get a few to market before the blight reached their farms. But you’d have thought those pumpkins were solid gold, for what they were asking for them. I guess, in hindsight, they were. 

   Spores they say. Some shit that mutated in Asia. Travels through the soil. Crazy fast. There was no stopping it. Boom. The pumpkins were gone. 

   We were stunned, more so than panicked. I mean, it was a little like waking up to the News telling you that there weren’t any more rocks. An odd thing to get your head around. They’re pumpkins. Yeah, you care, but not much. Not really. 

   Sure, there was some speculation as to how sad Fall would be without them, Halloween, Thanksgiving. #lonelyporch #missingthepumpkins #carvingnotcarving, but we bought up the plastic and plaster replacements, and pumpkin pie filling isn’t even made from real pumpkins. So we were covered. We moved on. They’d have the spores cleared up in no time, breed some resistant pumpkins, a little genetic modifying, something, and next year we’d be scooping the guts from those big orange guys again, stuffing them with candles to stave off the spooks and mark with light our homes as treat ready and waiting. 

   But we were wrong. So wrong. And so slow to make the connection between our own growing death rate and the loss of those taciturn and mostly ocherous fruits.