The Vegetable Girl (418)

It was one of those expensive places near Oxford Street that cater for a particular type of person: the sort of person who would pay large amounts of money to spend part of their day eating a salad, while spewing afternoon nothings from their mouths in carefully bred Islington lilts.

I reached the centre of the room without anyone really noticing me, and found myself alone with a great glass display case. Inside, tempting concoctions of rare fruits and vegetables lay on large white plates. Prising the glass open at the bottom, I slipped my hand in hungrily.

Someone grabbed my arm: I turned up my eyes to meet the glare of the girl behind the display. She pulled me around the counter. I wasn’t resisting, only trying to think of an excuse. Finally she guided me through a little curtain, and we were alone in the darkness of the kitchens behind the shop.

There we faced each other, and I looked her fully in the face for the first time. Her features were long and ethereal in the flat square of light we stood in. She whispered in my ear ‘let me show you something’. I saw that she was trembling slightly.

She walked past me and opened a small cabinet nailed against the wall. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I began to make out what it was that was moving around. In the box there writhed the head, arms and torso of a girl, who appeared to consist entirely of fruit and vegetables.

Her hair was made up of lettuce leaves, her fingers were flailing strips of cucumber and celery and other green vegetables, and her lips were formed by passion-fruit. The girl reached in to the box and cut a carrot areola from the dark skin, and the vegetable girl began to cry. But the tears blossomed as flowers from her red tomato eyes and we were captivated: the flowers of things that do not blossom are lovely as dreams in stone.

We stood there and watched while she twisted in silent anguish, because they had taken her tongue for a gherkin, and by the stump one could tell that it was just beginning to grow back. We stood there and watched: because even empathy can be overwhelmed by something when its suffering is beautiful.