Matt Barrett
Neither of us knew when Mrs. Varga stepped out, into the welcoming shade of her backyard, she’d just tied her husband to a pole in their basement with his favorite t-shirt stuffed inside his mouth. We didn’t know she’d caught him cheating or that the woman he cheated with was a friend of theirs. We didn’t know the Vargas had any problems at all. What we did know was that Mrs. Varga was a math professor, and so was her husband, but what kind of math, we hadn’t heard. We knew they’d come from Hungary and studied at Yale—or was it Princeton—fell in love and moved here to teach together at the college. We knew Mr. Varga had a limp but overcame it, a stutter but beat that, too. We knew they grew a garden but not very well. We knew ours was lusher, greener, our cherry tomatoes sweeter because they’d said so. We knew they turned the lights out at ten, left for work around eight and repeated the cycle five days a week. We knew they were cyclical, like us. That on a fundamental level, they subscribed to certain laws, like gravity and digestion and the need to breathe many thousand times a day. We knew they were older than us, had gray hair and a daughter who sometimes came to visit.
We knew their students referred to them both as Dr. Varga, but with us, they said Mr. and Mrs. will do. We didn’t know if they only told us this because we’d made the mistake so many times already. At night, we wondered what they thought of us—if they liked us, despised us, felt nothing about us at all. What’s Hungary like? we asked them once, and smiling, Mrs. Varga said, You mean the weather? People? Music? Culture?
God knows what we meant, so we offered them cherry tomatoes.
The day Mrs. Varga tied her husband to a pole, she waved to us from across the fence. Lovely day, no? And for the first time, she invited us into her yard.
If we’d have known where her husband was, we probably wouldn’t have joined her. Or dug the man-sized hole in a shady spot between her okra. But the way she watched us in her garden, so grateful we were there—I don’t know. What a thing it is to feel seen.
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Matt Barrett teaches creative writing at Gettysburg College and holds an MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro. His stories have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Sun Magazine, The Baltimore Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, River Teeth, The Minnesota Review, Pithead Chapel, Wigleaf, Best Microfiction (’22 &’23), and Best Small Fictions, among others. He tweets @MBarrettWriter.