the other day. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know where it came from, but I think it has the guts (the first paragraph anyway) to become something good, maybe even great. Give it a read to see what you think.

When Old Lady Sweet died they found a chest full of frozen tomatoes. Not canned, or quartered, or macerated in any sort of way, just whole Big Boys and Early Girls, some still on the vine, their skin shriveled and papery as lanterns. And they were solid; froze all the way through the consistency of croquet balls.

Clearing out the icebox and chest freezer fell to the man next door. Nathaniel had lived next to Miss Sweet for near thirty years, exchanging pleasantries, surplus casseroles and zucchinis (they both lived alone) and fruit cakes at Christmas. The tomatoes weren’t the strangest thing he’d seen. Peculiar, yes, but folks leaning that way always seemed a bit more interesting. He supposed that in a whirl of embarrassment she had bagged them all up and placed them in the freezer, not wanting to unload them on her neighbor already full to the gills with his own Nebraska Weddings—in his opinion, the only tomato worth giving a second thought. She couldn’t just throw them out now could she?

So there they sat. Frozen in threes and fours placed in paper sacks and stacked neatly in the left corner making a tower almost clean to the top. What was he to do with them? He knew damn sure he didn’t want to drop them—that would break your toe quicker than anything.