The Peach Pit at Dot’s Diner 

There was a phone we didn’t answer, a black telephone in a graffitied booth outside Dot’s Diner. When we were children, we would dare each other to pick it up when it rang, darting close and then away again. The boldest among us, Marv, went all the way one time, and he was never the same. He told us a voice spoke to him, a voice that slithered into his ear like an eel and then dropped to his feet wriggling and coiling about his legs so that he couldn’t move. This was the first sign we knew something was wrong because Marv didn’t talk that way. His family moved him away after he tried to detonate the phone booth with a Molotov cocktail, and we never saw him again.

At least not until last week, last week when he returned with a strange look in his eyes, a beard across his chin, and a beer belly matching the bellies we’d grown in the decades since we played our phone booth game.

“I’m looking for a peach tree,” Marv slurred. At first, we didn’t know it was him, just assumed he was any old alcoholic, swinging drunk at eleven-thirty in the AM. Dot knew what to do about those sorts, she’d not been running this truck stop diner for more than 35 years to not know what to do.

“You’ll find we don’t have no peach trees here, you might try Nat’s Nursery down the way, or, if it’s the peaches you’re after I do have pie. Haven’t won any awards for it, but I have it if that’s what you’re after.”

We raised our soda glasses to our favorite hostess and watched the man warily. A few of us hoped he would start something, give us a little morning exercise. The odd look seemed to clear from the stranger’s eyes for just a moment.

“A peach pie…? Wait a moment, that’s not what I’m here for,” he said, shaking off Dot’s firm and gentle guiding hand. “And why you—now why you treating me like you don’t know me? I’m Marv and I know all of you. Now why can’t you do an old friend a favor? A peach tree is all I’m after.”

“Marv?” we said, and none of us knew who spoke the name aloud, because certainly we’d all been thinking it.

“That funny little boy who used to come round and drink the most milkshakes of the bunch?” Dot asked. “Why sure I remember you!”

Marv stumbled then, though he hadn’t been moving.

“Y’okay there, Marv?” Dot asked.

“Sick, gonna be sick,” Marv said in a voice like a full stomach. He stumbled along to the toilets, and we watched him go, all of us wondering how this staggering drunk of a man had grown out of the precocious boy we’d once all known. He’d been long and lanky then, taller than the rest of us, which was probably why he was our leader back then. It wasn’t just assaults on the phone that he had led: he was always the first to jump in the lake after it thawed, sometimes before it thawed too, breaking the ice with his dad’s old axe; he was always the one to dare us to all to eat live worms and little frogs and when we wouldn’t call us pussies and then do it himself; and he was always the one we turned to beat up the bullies when they were bigger than us.

“What happened to you, Marv?” we said, and again none of us knew who said it, because all of us had been thinking it.

He was sweating bullets when he came out of the toilets, clear pebbles that rolled down his face and splashed heavily off the tip of his nose. He was groaning something awful and clutching his stomach. For a moment, we all thought we’d call 911 and get him some help. We all thought this, and all took out our phones to do it too. Until the strangest thing any of us had ever seen in our lives began to happen.

A green tendril unfurled slowly from his nose, delicate as a newborn bean sprout. It grew, wrapping itself slowly around his face while he continued to groan and stumble, seeming unaware of what was taking place. His hat was pushed off his head as more sprouts grew out from his scalp instead of hair.

“I got a pit in me the size of a peach pit!” Marv cried out, eyes flying wildly across the diner, not stopping on any of us until they reached Dot. It was the last thing he managed to say, because then a great, green snake-looking thing the size of an arm tumbled out of Marv’s mouth, righting itself a moment later to grow straight up. A few of us couldn’t look at what happened next, all of us felt our lunches come fighting back up. Marv’s skin peeled back, peeled like the bark on a birch tree, but wet and red, the soft tissues of him sloughing to the tiled floor. What was beneath, we discovered when we finally found it in ourselves to look back, was a tree.

This tree grew straight up to the ceiling and then spread out as though frustrated to find it was trapped in here with us. Little, golden globes began to grow on the tree’s branches like mosquitos filling themselves up with blood. Peaches. Beautiful, golden peaches. A mighty peach tree growing in the middle of Dot’s Diner.

“Well now, that’s just…” Dot said, and we couldn’t blame her for being speechless. Because the tree had Marv’s face, just a faint outline, but we could see it. It was a strange thing what happened that day, but from then on Dot’s peach pies won every contest she entered.

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 Edward Daschle (he/him/his) is a fiction writer currently studying in the University of Maryland’s MFA program. He grew up in the Pacific Northwest, the land of serial killers and Sasquatch, deadly mountains and overcast skies. You can find him on Twitter @ES_Daschle or in the climbing gym.