Glass Cabbage - a short story

Here is a sample story from my collection Glass Stories! Below it, I try to explain some of what I was thinking when I wrote it.

“Glass Cabbage” is a loose version of a story my Grandfather Grimes would tell us, a tale about a cabbage and a giant big toe that truly frightened me. As with all the stories in this collection, I added the glass.

If you’ve read Glass Stories, feel free to leave a review on Goodreads, Amazon, or wherever!

Glass Cabbage

The old man and old woman were out of food. Salespeople sometimes took the path through the woods and dropped by their house to sell things like flour and oil and manufactured sweets, which supplemented their diet of eggs and vegetables and the occasional squirrel or rabbit. But their chickens and ripening vegetables disappeared one night, and it had been weeks since a salesman from town had passed by.

“Maybe it was an animal who ate our vegetables,” the old man said and they discussed the possibilities.

“Then who stole our chickens? A person must have stolen them. The pen’s not damaged. There’s no blood around.”

The old man looked at the empty pen and wiped away a tear. “I reckon something bad has happened in town. It’s what we’ve always predicted.”

“But we don’t smell smoke, and we haven’t heard anything that sounds like disaster.”

“It might have happened in a different way than we thought it would.”

The woods were quieter than usual.

“I’ll have to try again to find a squirrel,” the old man said, though he hated to shoot them.

“I’ll do some foraging,” the old woman said, and they went their separate ways.

She made a final inspection of their vegetable garden for any overlooked scraps, finding only a wilted carrot top to toss into her sack. There had to be something deeper in the woods, some source of food. She was sure she’d die if she didn’t find something soon.

Winter was threatening, and the birds had eaten all the blackberries. Under the tallest oak trees in the forest, she found a couple of mushrooms for her bag. Nothing else. She kept going until she was somewhere she didn’t recognize. A thick row of thorn bushes seemed to have been placed specifically in her way, keeping her from something, but she pushed through, ignoring the pricks to her arms and face. On the other side, there was a field. A field! She didn’t know there were any farmers in the middle of the woods.

“Don’t get excited,” she reminded herself. When things were bad, they usually got worse. Naturally, the field was plucked bare. Since she didn’t notice anyone around, she decided to look around to see if any bit of food was overlooked.

Inside a dug-up row, she found a tiny potato. Into the bag it went. Was that all? No, there was something else there, at the far end of the field. A beautiful large leaf hid (she knew) something ripe and edible. She ran to the thick leaf and lifted it like a veil, and underneath she found a hard thing that glinted in the afternoon sun. It was a huge cabbage made of green-tinted glass.

“A glass cabbage.” She held it up to her face and whispered to it. Its surface was foggy with dew, but when she wiped it with her shirt, she saw something inside. A big toe. A rather large big toe.

She wished that the toe was a doll and that the toenail was the doll’s face. It was hard to accept what it was. The severed bottom of the toe was neatly bandaged, at least, and the toenail was well-cared for. When she turned the glass cabbage, rolling it around to see the toe from different angles, the toe moved, too. It bumped against the glass edges in a way that looked painful. But there was no one to feel any pain from it, was there?

So freshly preserved, that toe was. Pale pink, like a healthy pig. Any piece of meat could be prepared. It would be like skinning a squirrel.

She couldn’t fit the glass cabbage in her bag. It would have torn the seams. So she took up the cabbage in both arms and carried it home, needlessly shielding the glass from thorns. She couldn’t stop staring at the big toe inside. It must have been the toe of a giant. Distracted, she didn’t see a thick tangle of roots at her feet. She tripped, and the glass cabbage flew into the air. Before she could catch it, it fell on the hard roots and shattered.

She wanted to cry, but she stood up and picked her way through the broken glass to get to the toe. It was frightening to pick it up at first. And yet, she was desperate. She picked it up by its bandage and gave it a quick sniff. It had the same metallic smell as meat.

“It’s a sign,” she said to herself. She would have been forced to smash the glass cabbage to get at the big toe anyway. “Fresh meat.”

She rushed along, feeling like she was in some kind of danger until she reached her backyard. There, she prepared the toe. She half-ignored what she was doing, knowing she couldn’t relish her meal as much if she thought about the discarded parts. This was even easier than a squirrel in one sense. No guts. She used her ax to remove the toenail, and she peeled away the bandage, and she tried not to look at the toe before she dropped it in her boiling pot of water. She quickly dug a hole to bury the toenail and the bandage.

She put the measly carrot top and mushrooms and the tiny potato that she’d found into the pot, and she used some salt from her cupboard. After some time, the smell was intoxicating, and she looked into the pot and saw that the skin was beginning to separate from the meat. She pulled it off with metal tongs and dug a quick hole to bury the skin. She hated to waste any part of the meat, but there was something disturbing about that skin. It had the faded labyrinth of a toe print on it. Had it been another animal’s skin, she would have eaten it.

When the thing was cooked, it looked so tender. She used her tongs to shred the meat, and finally, she removed the bone from the stew and put it into another hole she’d dug. Soon, the remnants of the toe were buried in three different spots in her yard, and she had a delicious stew in her pot. She used her ladle to give it a taste, and it tasted no different from pork stew. Maybe it was even better.

She kept tasting, waiting for the old man to return. If the stew kept cooking, the meat would get tough. Finally, she decided to ladle herself a bowlful.

He was far away, no doubt, trying to set a slow trap for some creature. It was annoying of him not to know when to give up.

As she was eating the stew, she was disturbed a time or two by memories of finding the big toe and preparing it for the pot. It made her shiver to remember what it had been. Thinking about the buried remnants upset her, too. It was like she’d killed a man and buried his corpse in her yard.

No, no, it wasn’t nothing to worry about. If anything, the toe was meant for her. It had been placed there in that glass cabbage (which must have been some kind of magic), and it was like it had called her name. She had known just where to go to find it.

When was the last time she had eaten so well? Maybe years. The salesmen were willing to trade with them, to accept eggs for their goods, but the old woman suspected they were taking pity on them. When she was hungry, she hadn’t cared, but now that she was almost full, she was beginning to feel ashamed. Anyone who lived in town must have found them awfully pitiful. Maybe the old man liked being an object of pity because it made him interesting, and he liked to talk to the salesmen who wandered by and tell them stories of life in the woods, but the old woman didn’t like it. She saw herself as strong and happy, and the old man seemed to see her that way too. It confused her when others didn’t see her the same way, and it made her ask herself unhelpful questions. What was so great about being from one of the towns?

She kept eating. Her stomach raged for it, for every drop of it. When she was finished, she even used her fingers to scoop out the bits of carrot top stuck to the walls of the pot, and she savored the bits of grease that clung to the greens.

While she ate, she kept thinking the old man would catch her red-handed. But he didn’t. By the time he came home, it was pure night, and the pot had already been scrubbed and the fire put out. She was in bed when she heard him open the door. She pretended to be asleep when he came into the bedroom and took off his clothes and lay down beside her.

“I can smell it outside. You found something. You didn’t wait for me,” he said.

“What do you think about that?” she said without opening her eyes.

“I was trying too hard to find what wasn’t there. But you still should have saved me something. Some scrap of something.” He didn’t sound angry or even sad. He sounded like his feelings had floated away, up into the night sky.

“I did it for a reason, but I don’t know what the reason is,” she said. “I was so hungry. I think my body knows something.”

“You want me to die?” he said.

“No. I just want to live.”

The toe was meant for her. It thundered in her body as she digested it. Perhaps it was an evil toe, but it was hers. The old man might have gotten sick when he realized what he was eating. He might have ruined the meal.

They couldn’t make sense of it, either together or separately. Without meaning to, the old woman fell asleep. Some time later, a voice in the distance woke her up.

“Who?” That was all she heard at first. “Who?”

“It’s someone from the town,” she said to herself. “They’re having a disaster. But I’m not going out there.”

The voice was still distant, but it seemed to draw closer. “Who? Who? Who stole?”

“I didn’t steal,” she said aloud, sitting up in bed. The old man was snoring beside her.

“Who stole my big toe?” The voice was like a whistling wind prefiguring a tornado or terrible hail.

“I didn’t steal it! You left it there!”

In spite of her protests, she found herself running through the darkness to look outside for the source of the voice. The night was clear and cold. It must have been a bad dream.

No, there it was again. “Who stole?” It was as if a person had merged with a cloud or the moon and tried to speak through it. Whatever it was, the creature was getting closer.

“Show yourself!” she shouted. “If you’re going to accuse me, then do it to my face. I won’t be afraid of a possibility. You set me up to fail. I was hungry, and you put your toe out there, and you expected me not to eat it? It was calling to me!”

“You stole my big toe!” the voice said, but it was quieter than before.

“The choice you gave me wasn’t fair.” She felt ashamed for her complaints, like she was a child whining to her parents. But this was life or death. It was the difference between guilt or innocence.

She waited for the voice to accuse her again, but it didn’t.

(Glass Cabbage was first published by Matthew Stott in Tales From Between before appearing in Glass Stories)

What the heck does this story mean?

Well, I can’t say exactly what it means to me because then it wouldn’t be fun for me anymore. I’m sorry!

But I can say that I’m interested in stories like Pandora’s Box and the Garden of Eden where a woman entertains evil. In general, I’m interested in various explanations for and explorations of how evil exists in a world where (I assume) most of us want to be good. Mysteries godlike creatures intrigue me as well. Why would anyone, much less some kind of demigod, leave his big toe lying around to tempt someone?

It’s an absurd situation for the old woman, but it also shows her desperation. Clearly, she wouldn’t normally eat a giant big toe. My grandfather’s version of this story leaned into the absurdity and was much funnier than mine, but he was quite clear that the old man and old woman were in a hopeless situation. They were about to starve to death. In his version, too, he said the couple lived in “an old crooked house in the old crooked woods in the old crooked world.” Does the crookedness of the world make us less culpable for being cruel or selfish? My grandfather’s story ended differently, too. “Who stole my big toe?” he would ask. And then when you least expected it, there was a jump scare where he would shout — “You did!”

Also, consider this theory about the origin of the story of Hansel and Gretel.

I’m always curious to hear people’s various theories of evil, so feel free to share your own fables and clues.

Thank you all for reading!