Strawberry Picking

If you find this, I want you to know that we were fine right up until the moment we weren’t fine at all. We didn’t suffer much. We’d gone to pick strawberries, lured off the main road by a pick-your-own sign and an arrow aimed down the green lane. Thing is, around the bend were shipping containers and piles of styrofoam, a dozen bikes wrapped up in nettle and oatgrass, and a tractor on its side in the ditch like a felled bull. But strawberries, am I right? So we bumped on down the path, parked where we were told. There was a wide-eyed, gold-toothed boy at the field’s edge with what we looked like a goat on a leash; both of them were crying like babies. And then a sudden fearsome rustling in the car’s vents like mice in an old plaster wall and the first insinuations of leaf, before a watery rush of strangling vine that coated the windows first and me trying to