It was the orange that drew me in. Amid the gray of the tents and snow, in the drab of everyone’s coats and the ashen casts of their faces, the pumpkins, small and stunted as they were, glowed like beacons. Orange in the dark.

The pumpkins were stacked in piles in the woods at the edge of the market. I felt myself pulled to the glow.

I ducked into the woods, stepping around blown bits of trash, newspapers, and fast food bags. I wasn’t sure why the Pumpkin King, if that was what he was called, had chosen to sell his fruits here in the trees, except he didn’t have very many, and like all the other fruits and vegetables for sale at the market today, they looked paltry. He had scattered the piles around to make them seem more impressive.

Coming upon the first stack of pumpkins felt like discovering a prize. I thought of chicken of the woods, the bright orange mushrooms that grew wild in the forest around the farm. Mama and I would hunt for them in the fall, fry them up with butter. They were easy to spot because they were so bright, as orange as Halloween, almost pulsing with fluorescence. But they hadn’t come up this season; there hadn’t been a season.

I picked up the top pumpkin off a little stack. Tiny as my palm, and spotted with dark, raised warts.

“Those ain’t for eating,” a voice said.

I hadn’t noticed the man. From deeper in the trees, he stood up and came toward me, tall and lanky, moving as stiffly as a marionette. He wore a wide straw hat, better suited for summer.

“Decorative only,” the man said. “They ain’t even pumpkins. Those are gourds.”

“I know. Why are you selling them?”

He grinned, strangely white. Maybe false teeth. There was a funny clicking from his head. “Idiots will buy anything. Especially now. Now’s the time to unload all your shit.” He tilted his head, studying me in the shadows. “I know you. I know your folks.”

“Lobo’s not my daddy.”

“I know.”

Grayson had probably bought propane by now, and was waiting for me. All I had to show for the flea market was a bag of old apples and chestnuts. I shouldn’t have gone into the woods. “I should go,” I said.

“Wait a minute. I have something better than food.”

He would show me a knife, a gun. Something worse.

But the Pumpkin King didn’t move a step. He stretched out his arm. When his fist was below my face, he opened it, and I saw, in the cracks of his palm: seeds.

“Pumpkin seeds,” he said.