Maggie

August 2008

On Google Maps, in aerial view, Rubber Chicken Farm was a rectangle, fifty-some-odd acres, that stretched the half mile from one dirt county road to the next. Off the southwest corner, a one-acre square of land held the farmhouse, the pole shed with its fenced corral, a detached garage, and a horseshoe-shaped driveway—rutted and dusty despite the annual harrowing—for pull-through access. It was a few miles south of the farm Maggie and her grandmother had lost, twenty miles east of the distant jagged wall of the Rocky Mountains, barely visible through a windbreak of burr oak and American plums and junipers, their trunks and branches woven behind and across and through the lilacs and the chokecherries, a complicated basketry of moderate protective value. Clouds drifted across the immense, empty sky. Red-tailed hawks and bald eagles perched on the power poles. Owls left pellets in the field roads. She and her husband, Fish, called it theirs, loved it like it was theirs, but really, the bank owned most of it.

They’d been harvesting all day, a short break for lunch when the heat set in after noon, hours more in the hot sun, and then Fish had gone in to make dinner—pork chops from a pig named Hannah Montana, a name their daughter, Ozzie, now fifteen, had chosen two years before and found mortifyingly childish now. He’d grill some vegetables, add raspberries he’d picked fresh to the chocolate cake he’d baked from scratch. Fish had been living on Little Caesars pizza and canned soup when they met, but he’d almost immediately apprenticed himself to Flora in the kitchen, and now he was an excellent cook. She had complained, just one time, that there was too much to do in the field for either of them to cook, and Fish had laughed. “You can’t preach the importance of food culture to our customers,” he’d said with his goofy, cockeyed smile, “if you’re eating cereal for dinner.” It was impossible to argue with, and she’d decided to keep any further objections to herself.

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She took her boots off on the patio, then peeled away her socks. She let her aching feet breathe the fresh air for a moment, and then she went inside the house.

The kitchen smelled like cantaloupe funk and bacon grease—the cast-iron skillet wiped but not scrubbed. A batch of ruby-jeweled raspberry jelly in half-pint glass jars glowed from the counter. Fish’s great-grandfather, Maximillian, had built the small farmhouse back before permits and building inspectors, and you could tell by the slight lean of the back wall, the crack in the foundation that let sunlight into the root cellar. There were laundry hookups in the mudroom. Three tiny bedrooms. A bathroom two people could use at once as long as one of them was in the shower, big enough if you weren’t fussy about privacy. Small enough they could heat the whole place with the woodstove in the living room, which had been especially handy this past winter, when they could not afford propane to run the central heat. A portrait of Maximillian and his wife, Katja, hung above the table, the man’s eyes so intense and focused that Maggie sometimes set the picture facedown on the counter so that he would stop staring.

She washed her hands and took her seat, the table already set, a candle lit between her plate and Fish’s. Fisher Markus’s mama had given him her last name as his first, and Maggie still loved the way it felt in her mouth, still loved the long dark curls that stuck out from under his goofy trucker caps, the way they felt between her fingers, the way they felt between her legs. She loved his constancy. The wild stories he told. The feelings he wore on his sleeve. Fish cried the same way he laughed, easily and often, his emotions as plain and changeable as clothes. At Ozzie’s school music concerts. Sappy TV commercials. Birthday parties. All the man’s strongest feelings presented as tears. It embarrassed him, but it endeared her.

“Appraisals”

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They’d started dating at the tail end of her first year of college, and by September she’d come up pregnant. It had been a shock, but she’d only fleetingly considered an abortion. She’d had enough of loss, enough subtraction, was ready to shift the family math back to addition. It hadn’t been clear to her at the time that she’d be adding Fish, too, not permanently, anyway. But he’d been delighted by the news, as eager as she was to meet this new human. She’d proposed to him under October’s harvest moon, and they made things official at the courthouse on the spring equinox, no ceremony they couldn’t afford, no rings, no honeymoon. He’d moved in with her and Flora before Oz was born. Conventional wisdom was that they’d have split at least ten times by now, but they’d been happy all these years, so happy she’d sometimes wondered if there was any ceiling to their happiness, and if so, when they might hit it, whether now, months after he’d been laid off from his job as a landscape foreman, they had.

She helped Fish clean the kitchen after dinner and they went back out to the field, each of them with headphones on, lost in their own thoughts. When dusk fell, they ran Scooby’s headlights into the rows and strapped headlamps onto their foreheads. It was midnight when they got the last load back to the barn, the exertions of the day pressing heavy on them both, a 4 a.m. alarm already set. When she started arranging buckets of sunflowers, setting up to make bouquets, she could see Fish was ready to mutiny. 

“Can’t we just go to bed?”

She grabbed a sunflower like a fencing foil and jabbed the bloom at his nose, trying to keep things playful, to shift the energy between them. “Another hour. That’s all. These little babies are dollars on stalks. And we need dollars.” He couldn’t argue with that. They both knew the mortgage was due.

He swatted the flower away, which seemed to surprise them both. He rarely reached the end of his rope. “They’re only dollars if they sell. And they haven’t been.”

The first two years at market, Maggie had sold out of flowers, the quality and color of her blooms far better than the second-thought scraggly bouquets at most other farm stands, and this season had started out just the same. In June, she’d sold every bunch of peonies she cut, all the larkspur, the snapdragons, the bells of Ireland. By July, with unemployment still climbing and the news full of debates about who was and who was not too big to fail, customers stuck closer to crops they could eat, sometimes even putting the bouquets back in the display when she gave them their totals. Her wholesale clients—florists and wedding planners—cut their standard orders, and the past two Saturdays she’d hauled blooms home to the compost pile for the first time ever, which had given both of them plenty of time to think about what it meant, in the context of global economic uncertainty, that a ten-dollar market bouquet had suddenly become a luxury purchase.

But what did he think they should do? They’d already paid for the seed and the gas to prep and cultivate the rows. They’d already done the labor of planting and watering and weeding, and it had worked, they’d grown a perfect, beautiful crop of field-grown specialty cut flowers. There was still a chance they’d sell them. She, at least, was going to try. “Nobody’s forcing you,” she said.

This time he flinched, and though she hadn’t meant it that way, she knew he’d heard it as What the fuck else do you have to do? God, he was fragile these days, raw as meat, her foot always in her mouth. Just before he’d hit the twenty-six-week limit for unemployment benefits, the government passed an emergency measure to give the “long-term unemployed” another thirteen weeks. “Lucky break,” she’d said, trying to bright-side it.

But Fish had looked disgusted, like she’d said something unforgivable. “This what luck feels like, you think?”

She could think of no way to comfort him, then or now. She felt guilty every time she hit a nerve, and irritated because she never meant to, and it didn’t seem fair for him to see her like some bully hen that just wouldn’t stop pecking.

They’d bought the farm in 2006, just before the housing bubble burst. The stock market tanked, subprime lenders were dropping left and right, but nobody was calling it a recession, and at first they thought they didn’t have to worry too much. “Rich people’s problems,” she’d said, and Fish agreed. They’d gotten a fixed rate on their mortgage. They didn’t own stocks, and they weren’t planning to. They’d never gained anything when the stock market went up, so what did it matter to them if it came down? To Maggie, Wall Street was the same as the Farm Service that had betrayed her grandparents, both of them no better than Las Vegas. Untrustworthy systems to avoid, whatever money existed there a carefully baited trap.

Fish had worked for a landscape company that subcontracted with developers to plant the one tree, three shrubs, and five perennials that came with the purchase of each newly constructed home. He laid bluegrass in postage-stamp front yards, installed the irrigation systems that kept the plants and sod alive. The work held steady at first, even as the Bear Stearns hedge funds filed in bankruptcy court. But then new home permits dropped off a cliff, and banks stopped lending, and it was all everyone’s problem. Fish spent the second half of 2007 working worried. Pushing a shovel. Waiting for the ax. He was laid off just after the new year, and the job search had gone, was going, poorly. Which was why they had to work to sell every last sunflower, every last tomato, the farm their best chance at a future in which neither of them had to work for anyone but themselves. This had always been the dream, but so far, she hadn’t been able to convince Fish that the layoff was an opportunity, not a disaster.

She started in on the bouquets—five zinnias, three statice, three snow-on-the-mountain, three globe amaranth. Strip any leaves the harvest had missed and rubber-band the stems together, loosely, so they didn’t break. Trim the ends at an angle and drop the bunch into a bucket of fresh preservative solution. Making bouquets was like math, or cooking—find the right recipe, the right combination, and then replicate—mindless and satisfying and easy. Soothing, somehow, even at oh-dark-thirty.

Fish watched her do the first bouquet. Then he put Check Your Head in the CD player, so loud they couldn’t have spoken if they’d wanted to, and worked alongside her. Lazy-drifting dust swirled in the moonbeams that streamed in through the open side doors and the arcs of the overhead lights, all of it illuminating years of collected junk. Empty metal shells of automatic waterers they thought they might fix. Folgers cans full of bent nails they might someday straighten. Harvest buckets. Stirrup hoes. Old brake rotors. A batch of young broiler chickens—quiet at night, though they sang sweetly all day long— in the brooder that stunk of ammonia and straw and the fly trap above it, full of floating black corpses. She’d have to replace the attractant, not now, of course, but before these birds went out to the field next week, before the new batch of chicks arrived in the mail.

At 2 a.m. they cleaned themselves up and collapsed into bed, still not speaking. When Fish’s breath shifted rhythmic and deep, Maggie rolled toward him, watched his face and body relax. Asleep, he looked more like himself—easygoing, affable. She wished she’d pushed him, during the standoff over the bouquets, into just having the argument. They were good at arguments, liked them even, for the way they could hang all their hard feelings out in the open, let the sunlight soften them as they rippled and aired in the breeze. This quiet swallowed resentment threatened to make them both sick, but maybe it had been for the best. It had been too late, just then, to walk anything back, both of them too exhausted to explain without making things worse.

Moonlit leaf shadows quivered across his face. Tentatively, gently, she put her hand on his chest and worked to match her own breath to the rise and fall of his. He didn’t wake, not all the way, but he put his hand on top of hers, and she drifted, reassured, into a fitful sleep.

Claire Boyles is a writer and former farmer. Her debut novel, “Appraisals,” was published in August 2026. A 2022 Whiting Award winner in fiction, she is the author of “Site Fidelity,” which won the High Plains Book Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in Sierra Magazine and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other journals, and she is a screenwriter with multiple credits on the Hallmark Channel. She splits time between Loveland, Colorado, and Ames, Iowa, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing and the environment at Iowa State University.