Leftovers

from "Folk Song" by James Tate, collected in Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee.

And the vegetable garden, the folk songs, the talk of having a family, were they simply leftovers on a dead person's plate?

This here is the central image in a very short story about a woman whose mother has committed suicide. Darcie can't seem to find comfort in settling down with Johnny, and her pregnancy is a source of anxiety.

The fact that Darcie has not yet died, and the plate is her mother's, makes this the sort of bizarre interpersonal anguish that is one of Tate's principal themes. This collection of stories is just as hallucinatory as the author's poetry, but the book reads smoothly enough that you end up suffering alongside the characters.

Darcie seems to independently appreciate folk music and horticulture, but the narrator rhetorically suggests that these traits are an unwilling inheritance. She is doomed to a bad imitation of her forebears, in just the way that the march of time relegates us to eating unappetizing food that's been in the fridge lord knows how long.