Living As a Moon by Owen Marshall

three with a red sticker. She said my work doesn’t appeal to the man in the street, and she said it unkindly. You’re a man in the street, well on the doorstep anyway, and you can tell me what you think.’ Sally tilts her chin and gives a laugh free of bitterness.
    ‘At the gallery?’
    ‘No, here, here! There’s plenty of my work in the studio here. You give me your man in the street views and I’ll give you a cup of coffee, or maybe the old bricks you want.’
    ‘I’m no expert on art,’ he says.
    ‘That’s the point — Graeme isn’t it? That’s the point, Graeme. The man in the street, the curator said.’
    ‘I do have an interest in ancient pottery and sculpture as part of my studies,’ says Graeme. He’s trying to suppress a slight affront at being assumed a representative of the proletariat.
    ‘So much the better: history provides perspective. Excellent. I’ll just put these peas and fish fingers in the freezer before we go through.’
    She does so, then opens the back door and leads Graeme to what he’d assumed to be a garage, but which has become her studio. The afternoon sun has escaped the cloud and slants through the small window, but Sally snaps on the lights as well. Graeme’s first impression is of a bizarre produce show, or harvest festival. Dry pumpkin and marrow like ornamented shells on a trestle table, a scatter of incising tools, coloured leather and foil leaf, beads, lacquers, paints, brushes and bubble wrap. ‘Don’t say a word,’ she says. ‘Don’t say a word till you’ve had a look round.’
    Sally may not want Graeme to say a word, but she can’t repress her own enthusiasm. ‘Gourds,’ she says. ‘I tell people that my art is always gourd.’ She laughs in his ear, bending to see what he’s taken up from the table to examine. ‘The calabash gourd was the first plant species ever domesticated. Long before pottery, gourds were used as containers and for display. Creek Indians in the US used gourds for centuries as purple martin birdhouses as well as storing corn. They knew purple martins fed on insects that damaged their crops.’ Her hand is halfway towards the gourd he has picked up, as a mother’s instinctive movement when another picks up her child. ‘Bicolour pear,’ she says. How light and balanced it feels in the hand, how glowing the red and yellow geometric patterns Sally Army has given it.
    ‘They’re lovely,’ says Graeme. He feels slightly uneasy in the glare of Sally’s almost obsessive enthusiasm. For a stranger to reveal so much emotion is almost an exposure.
    Sally is delighted to have someone she can instruct, assuming everyone was bound to love a gourd. ‘People think of pumpkins and Halloween jack-o’-lanterns,’ she says, ‘but there’s a whole culture tied up with gourds. Musical instruments even — marimbas, maracas and gourd banjos. In some places they were a currency.’
    ‘The decoration is so intricate, so colourful.’
    ‘The galleries tell me they won’t sell at the price, though, that I shouldn’t spend so much time on each one. People don’t understand about the curing, polishing, the special paints and gold foil and everything. There’s cheap ones brought in from overseas. Stuff done for the tourist trade with machine scrolling.’
    ‘Where do you get yours?’ Graeme asks.
    ‘I grow them on my son’s farm at Ashburn. He and his wife think I’m potty, but they humour me.’
    ‘They’re not actually pumpkins, are they?’
    ‘No, but all the same family. Pumpkins are the world’s largest fruit. Did you know that?’
    ‘Really.’
    ‘In 2002 in New Hampshire there was one officially weighed in at 1337 pounds.’
    Graeme shakes his head, not in disbelief at giant pumpkins, but to convince himself that he’s here, in a backyard garage with a tall, mannish and ageing woman who spends her life creating wonder on vegetable shells. ‘I’d better be on my way,’ he says.
    ‘But as the man in the street, what’s