CUCUMBERS

Lyusya Kamyshova, known to all as Lyuska-Cuke, sowed her cucumbers all out of season that year. Not like any normal person – on the fifth of June, the feast day of St. Leontius of the Cucumbers – oh no! In March, if you please.

“What a life,” Lyusya said to herself, as she and her friends were downing cheap wine in the empty clubhouse. “What a life. But if the cucumbers freeze all to hell, I’ll be free for the whole year, have time to work out what makes me happy.”

The thing is that Lyusya was famous village-wide as Yamtsovo’s most successful cucumber farmer. Cucumbers were birthed all over the village but, either because the Yamtsovites were too greedy or because the weather had been less than bountiful, they always came out as enormous as hot air balloons or as crooked as Grandpa Matvey’s fingers, or shriveled, or shaped like a light bulb or a mini-cantaloupe. Only Lyusya’s were high grade and easy to recognize by variety – some cornichons for pickling, some salad cucumbers to be sliced just so, some neither massive nor too small but sweet enough to feed to little kids, some with black spines, prickly, for the cold brining known as monastery style. And the yellow, seedy, huge, depressed-looking ones Lyusya picked early, so that no one would pilfer them and horn in on her priceless stash of cucumber seeds.