There were six of them, like large pale tears. He saw that I saw them, then he closed up his fist and shoved his hand in his pocket. “Those ain’t just any seeds. Those are from a monster, the biggest specimen I got last year. Connecticut Field. Introduced 1800. People bake ’em in pies, but they can get huge.” He patted his pocket with his other hand. “This one sure did. Pretty good eating. And they’re keepers. You don’t have to grow ’em right away. That’ll be important now.”

I must have looked at him strangely.

“Girl,” the Pumpkin King said. “Ain’t your mama and stepdaddy telling you anything? Ain’t you preparing?”

“For what?”

“These are the only seeds at the market today. The ones folks planted last year died. Froze in the ground. Never sprouted.” The Pumpkin King shook his head. “These are from the year before, when we had a season.”

“They’re old, then.”

“You should know better than that. Shit, seeds can keep for years, if they’re dry. These seeds are good,” he insisted. “They’ll grow in the right conditions, grow a monster, feed a family, I guarantee it.”

“I don’t have a family,” I said.

The flea market soldiered on at my back, just a few feet behind me, in the parking lot. Tents flapped. The breeze carried the smell of sausages and oil. People called out the prices of things, and yes, the prices were a tank of propane or diesel or deer meat or a sweater—but I could almost pretend the world was the same, at the edge of the market. In the trees with the Pumpkin King, though, we lived in another time, a changed time, one with gourds for sale, priced like jewels; seeds hawked like magic beans.

“Girl,” the Pumpkin King said. If he knew my name, he didn’t use it. “If anyone could find the right conditions, it would be you. You know how to make things grow under piss-poor conditions, under penalty of law. It’s in your blood.”

“Lobo’s not my real daddy.”

“It’s in your blood,” he repeated.

And maybe it felt that much colder in the trees, in the darkness cast by their laced bare branches—I noticed for the first time how the trees felt like a trap, a closing net—or maybe the temperature really did drop again. Maybe it was constantly dropping. Maybe we were sliding, swiftly, into a total winter, forever winter, the world riding an ice chute straight to a bottomless well. But I could not get out of the woods, away from the Pumpkin King, fast enough. I said the only thing I knew that would shut him up.

“How much?”

“What you have on your farm.”

“I don’t have it with me,” I said.