1.

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Your older sister, Bess, cracked a joke about the sorry state of your lawn, which is why a few months later

you decided to grow something. You had no interest in a garden, but you were very interested in proving Bess wrong, so on the first warm Saturday of the year, you found yourself wandering down the aisles of Target wrestling flaccid bags of soil, fetid-looking bulbs.

“Looks like someone has a green thumb,” the checkout lady said. It made you wonder if they trained people who worked there to say things like that, to make such bald observations. You watched her come across the little pregnancy test that you had snuck snugly between gardening supplies. You waited for her to say, “Looks like someone’s been ovulating!”

But she didn’t say that. She didn’t say anything at all. She just picked up the box, swiped it under the scanner’s light, and dropped it into the darkness of your sack.

2.

The word “sack” had been popping into your head a lot lately.…