The Nut Farmer

My short story is published in The Saturday Evening Post's 'Great American Fiction Anthology 2025'

The first time I tasted a Landomunn Farms pistachio, it ruined me. No pistachio before or since has ever tasted as creamy, luscious, or as sweet as Dane Landomunn’s. I worshipped pistachios. I loved cashews, pecans, and walnuts too, for that matter. In fact, I loved nuts of any kind (except the legumes confused as such). And the best nuts came from Landomunn Farms.

Dane Landomunn carted one truckload of his produce to the farmers market each Sunday. His nuts were why I found myself coming back each week going back 3 1⁄2 years. That’s 182 Sundays that I have procured anywhere from 1 to 5 pounds of Landomunn Farms nuts. At an average of 3 pounds of nuts per week, that means I’ve taken home over 1⁄4 ton of those protein-rich goodies in that short window of time. Those are big numbers. Impressive even. They’re the kind of numbers that stand out. Figures that make people

want to boast. Numbers with this kind of magnetism tend to command attention. These kinds of numbers seemed to find their way into Dane Landomunn’s orbit frequently. It’s as if his very nature enchanted his surroundings into delivering always in abundant quantities.

I suppose one would have considered Dane Landomunn himself rather bewitching. The number of people who came to his stall each week was enough to make you want to show up early. The number of people who stood in line just to have a five-minute chat only grew longer, as Dane Landomunn’s conversations usually ran for about fifteen.

I personally never found Dane Landomunn charming, but those large numbers don’t lie. People seemed to really like the guy.

Dane Landomunn always brought a helper with him to the farmers market. I was maybe five weeks into my Landomunn Farms addiction before I noticed that his aides were always someone new. His assistants fit a type. They were always middle-aged. They rarely knew anything about the Landomunn Farms products. They oversaw all the transactions, yet they never actually handled any of the money. They tallied

the total and then would call Dane Landomunn over whenever it was time to make the exchange.

That, and they were always women.

“How are you doing this fine Sunday?” Assistant No. 47 levied at me on one such Sunday. She wore a wide-brimmed hat that cast a shadow on her floral top with risqué cutouts you wouldn’t have expected to see on a Sunday morning. She was wrapped in orange overalls that fit like an afterthought or something borrowed. Her gums were larger than her gleaming teeth and she still bore residuals of last night’s makeup.

“I’m doing all right,” I managed to respond, choking back the hate I had for mornings and any human interaction that occurred before noon. The same hate that Landomunn Farms nuts forced me to overlook every Sunday only because the nuts were that good.

“You look like you come here often,” Assistant No. 47 said to me with enthusiasm. “I’m Linda,” she articulated, enunciating the L in her name with her tongue as if she were licking lipstick off her top teeth. The corners of her mouth stretched into a wide smile that made it look like the edge of her grin would meet with each of her ears. It seemed she wanted me to like her as much as the

line of people waiting to talk to Dane Landomunn seemed to like him.

“I’m not seeing any pistachios,” I said curtly. I had no time to waste on small talk. There was only a small window before the crowds got unbearable, and the line for Dane Landomunn had already grown past my comfort zone.

“Pistachios, pistachios,” Linda mimed The Thinker on her chin. She looked around and nodded her head in seeming agreement with me. There were indeed no pistachios on display. She grabbed me by the hand and whispered, “Wait here just a second ... lemme ask Dane.”

Now, I probably should have mentioned that I’m a clairsentient. It’s like being a clairvoyant except my visions come by way of touch. It’s an ability that I started to notice sometime around puberty. Being a clairsentient is sort of like being able to read people’s minds, which sounds like a cool superpower until it happens to you. People tend to be either way more sinister or way more damaged than you would think. One touch and I learn more than I need to know about any one person. It’s a strange and oftentimes jarring thing. The first time it happened, a neighbor boy had grabbed me by my arms, which sent flashing images of him strangling a cat darting through my

head. It was a memory I thought I’d pushed out successfully until I saw the frantic “cat missing” flyers posted all around my neighborhood.

With my “gift,” I don’t see into a person’s future, only their past. At times, a person’s entire life history could get downloaded to me in an instant. Most often, a scene or two will flash in front of me. It’s usually something buried deep in a person’s psyche. Issues that I suppose are assuredly compelled to make a troubling spectacle of themselves simply because they have an audience who can perceive them at that precise moment. There are even times when I’m forced to experience the emotions. I’ve felt people’s worst fears or biggest regrets, and it’s a dizzying and sometimes nauseating endeavor. I’ve even tapped into someone’s disposition where I detected traits like narcissism and even psychopathy. The subconscious really doesn’t like to be ignored.

Obviously, it makes shaking hands or hugging strangers pretty weird. So, when Linda and her baby teeth squeezed my hand, I was forced into seeing a rapid montage of visions that sent me spinning. In the first flash, she looked to be about four years old. She was outfitted in a beige dress with a frilly skirt that was dotted with white and

yellow flowers. She had a teddy bear in one hand and the hand of a woman who I knew to be her mother in the other. Young Linda shifted slightly on her feet, where I could get a glimpse of the patent leather Mary Janes she wore. The pair squeezed hands while they watched a casket get lowered into the ground. Young Linda dropped her teddy bear at the same time her mother collapsed. Milliseconds later in the second vision, I could see an older, maybe twentysomething Linda getting beaten by a man I could feel was either her husband or romantic partner. He was screaming something stupid about dinner getting cold while he smashed her face into the cabinet above the stove. I could taste the metallic blood in her mouth and feel the wet tears streaming down her face. The final flash was one of her looking at herself in her dresser’s vanity mirror while she got plowed from behind by Dane Landomunn.

I pulled my hand away quickly, and Linda left to engage in her missing pistachio interrogation with Dane Landomunn. My body flushed with the kind of shock reserved for moments like walking into an occupied restroom stall or catching your parents having sex. I wanted to run, but my addiction to Landomunn Farms nuts kept me put. I picked up a pound of walnuts that were lying on

the table right in front of me, then a pound of pecans that rested next to the walnuts. I intensely studied the Landomunn Farms logo emblazoned on both packages in a desperate attempt to replace the image of Dane Landomunn’s sweaty, hairy body grunting like a dying moose.

“He just forgot to pull ’em out of the truck is all,” Linda stated as she made her way back over to me. She negotiated an armful of single-pound bags of pistachios she was holding as if she were carrying a litter of kittens. She smiled then giggled like she was about to tell me a secret. “I grabbed five bags,” she continued. “How many do you need?”

“I’ll take them all,” I declared without hesitation. I knew after that vision I would need to skip a few weeks of coming to the farmers market as a palate cleanser of sorts. I knew I needed to stock up.

“Dane?” she called over to him apprehensively. “Dane? She’s got five pistachios, and ...”

I quickly cut her off. “This should cover it.” I didn’t want Dane Landomunn to come closer for fear that image would trap itself in my head forever. I dropped a crisp $100 bill and two twenties on the table in front of Linda. I threw the

nuts in my canvas tote and hightailed it out of there as fast as I could.

***

I let nearly three months pass before I could bring myself back to the farmers market and face Dane Landomunn. I had long since run out of pistachios, and my addiction had been pushed to the limit of its tolerance. I grabbed my tote and braced myself for the visuals that would inevitably dance across my open eyelids the moment I saw him.

As I walked up to the Landomunn Farms booth, I felt an unexpected disappointment. I don’t know why I expected to see Linda there. In her place was a voluptuous woman with a mousey demeaner sitting in the same chair where Linda had sat. The new woman’s face was wrinkled in a frown as she engaged with a customer looking as if she were the one being inconvenienced. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she definitely looked frazzled. She swiftly swung her head from side to side wearing a confused and perturbed expression, as if she had been somehow teleported to this location and couldn’t register why she was there nor how she got stuck bargaining with this customer.

“Dane ... Daaaaaaaaaaane ...” she screamed with insecurity, holding up the customer’s bags of nuts. “I don’t ... I don’t know ... I don’t know how much these are. I don’t know how much he owes you for all this.”

Dane Landomunn excused himself from his social tête-à-tête and rushed over to help his helper. His face was pocked with red blotches of aggravation and his mannerisms were impatient. I shared his feelings about this woman. But I would guess we were feeling annoyed for different reasons. I had been overcome by an ineffable loyalty to Linda all of a sudden. Someone with those kind of bruises on her psyche didn’t stand much of a chance weathering a world full of Dane Landomunns, and this new woman with her ineptitude and her sheer unwillingness to even try to do the bare minimum filled me with an odd kind of rage.

Where is Linda? I thought, and how could Dane Landomunn just toss her aside for a woman like this?

My thoughts surprised me almost as much as my unexpected protectiveness over Linda, a woman I had barely met. For nothing more than curiosity, I felt the need to examine my reaction, and I readied myself with a plan. I watched from

a comfortable distance as Dane Landomunn finished his customer transaction. He turned to his assistant de jour and levied rudimentary instructions at her as if he were talking to someone below the age of five.

I filled my arms with a few bags of pistachios and cashews while I waited for Dane Landomunn to return to his conversations at the other end of the stall. I walked over to the table where the new woman sat. She looked utterly defeated. I unloaded my arms of all the bags of nuts I held. Then I did something I would normally never do. I placed my hand around the woman’s forearm and said, “Hang tight, I’m just gonna grab a bag of candied pecans from over there.”

Instantly my mind bled painful visions of this woman’s history. The first was an image of a young girl taking a bath. A man in his mid-20s barged through the bathroom door and stumbled towards the toilet. He lifted the toilet seat with his foot, unzipped his fly, and let a clumsy stream of urine fall into the bowl. He struggled to stay on his feet, splashing his stream on the floor around the bowl, when he finally noticed the young girl in the tub.

“Oh, hey there, Delilah,” he smirked then swung around and peed on her head. “Whoops,”

he chuckled, then swung back around to deposit the last few drops in the toilet before zipping up his fly and stumbling back out of the bathroom.

The next memory flash was young Delilah playing with dolls on her bedroom floor. Her bedroom door flew open and a woman who was certain to be her mother spilled into the room. She steadied herself on the door jamb, letting the bottle she held clink against the strike plate. In her other hand was a half-filled highball that sloshed liquid over the lip as she swayed. The mother struggled to grip the highball as she extended her pointer finger at the little girl.

“You ...” she accused. Her eyes rolled around in her head as if she forgot what she was saying. “YOU!” she levied again. “I know what you did! I named you Delilah, but I should have called you Jezebel!”

The mother then tossed the near empty bottle at a dollhouse that rested in the corner of Delilah’s room. The bottle crashed with a screech that scared me. It took a chunk off the roof of the dollhouse before making a significant dent in the wall behind it.

The next vision was of adolescent Delilah lifting some $20 bills from her mother’s purse. Delilah moved her packed duffel bag off her back

pant pocket so she could stuff the stolen cash there. She sneaked past her mother whose sleeping face was smooshed into a couch cushion. Delilah looked back and observed her mother’s arm extended to the floor pinching a spent cigarette. The tower of ash scattered when Delilah opened the front door.

The final peek into Delilah’s story involved Dane Landomunn.

***

The farmers market itself had become an obsession that I was no longer afforded the liberty of skipping. I wasn’t sure if the bigger draw was my addiction to Landomunn Farms nuts or my newfound obsession with Dane Landomunn’s constantly revolving substitute assistants, but I henceforth never missed a Sunday.

As I walked up one weekend, I could see a pair of feet dangling from the back of Dane Landomunn’s truck. They belonged to Delilah’s successor, who was apparently sleeping off drink from the night before. The week that followed brought a woman in white. She had pure white hair, porcelain doll skin protected by a wide- brimmed, stark-white sedge hat. Her billowy white clothes draped over her slight frame like a

towel on a hook. White polish dotted her fingernails as well as the tips of her toes that peeked from underneath her white linen dress. She stayed nearly mute save for the few words she whispered directly into Dane Landomunn’s ear. He buzzed her away like a gnat, but she never left his side. I marveled at the way he somehow managed to keep her invisible while he both engaged in his weekly conversations and transacted exchanges with his nut aficionados. The subsequent week ushered in the replacement for the lady in white. The new helper came dressed in leather. She wore skintight, black calfskin pants and had faded knuckle tattoos that looked more like green-tinted, charcoal smudges than anything discernable. Her threadbare tank top read Unleash the Beast, with the graphic text stretched painfully across her flaccid breasts. I saw her making side hustles and pocketing Dane Landomunn’s cash. I said nothing. Dane Landomunn brought that on himself.

I got what I needed from the Landomunn Farms booth then decided to take my time perusing the rest of the market. I was caught off guard by my enjoyment and generous mood, which provided me with a rare tolerance for people and stimuli. I swung by the smoothie bar

near the entrance of the market, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. I ordered a blueberry shake and watched as they made it. I was surprised at how few blueberries it took to permanently stain the pristine milk and ice cream such a vivid purple. I sipped my shake and thought about Linda, Delilah, and the many others. I wondered what they were doing. If they all knew each other. I tried to imagine what their everyday life might look like. If they had dreams. If they were satisfied. If they have or would ever find what they were looking for. I wondered how they made their way into Dane Landomunn’s orbit, and if they were okay now that they’d been spit back out of it.

I threw the rest of my milkshake into a nearby garbage can and headed home.

***

Sunday had come around again. I checked the pantry and saw that I still had nuts remaining from my last haul. Still, my curiosity got the better of me. I had to go see who the guest-starring helper would be this week at Landomunn Farms. By the time I got to the market, the crowd had already grown thick with shoppers. I was careful to make my way into open spaces so as not to

bump into anyone. I walked up to the table and grabbed a bag of honey sesame cashews.

“You’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven,” a voice said to me from behind. A hand softly touched both of my shoulders and gently moved me to the side as she opened a small pathway for herself to make it to the other side of the table in front of me. I caught a glimpse of her dark hair and green eyes before I was fed a tableau of images from her childhood.

I could see a young girl with green eyes, suitcase in hand, following a nondescript adult up a flight of carpeted stairs. The stairs were encased in a dark, wood-paneled passageway that spilled out onto a landing which was just another dark hallway lined with closed doors. The adult knocked on the door at the end of the hall which opened to a midsized bedroom with neutral- colored walls. Inside were three other girls who looked nothing like each other or the girl with the green eyes. The three girls were sitting on top of their respective twin beds, slinging words at each other across the room. The chatter died down as the girl with the green eyes made her way over to an empty bed. She pushed her suitcase underneath the bed, turned around, and sat down where she could face the other girls.

The next memory looked to be about a year later. The girl with the green eyes hid wrapped inside window curtains as she watched one of her young roommates place all her belongings into the trunk of a fancy car. There was a giddy couple that hugged each other before helping the young roommate into the backseat. The girl with the green eyes knew she would never see her young roommate again and watched teary-eyed as the car drove off and out of sight. There were two more quick memories that recounted the remaining two roommates as they each found placement in respective, permanent homes. Then a quick sequence of strange snapshots followed which featured various foster homes where the girl with green eyes bounced around, staying only temporarily. It seemed she was destined to live out most of her childhood days in the initial halfway house. The scenes of the foster homes looped in a dizzying cycle that always had her walking back through the dark hallways feeling dejected and alone. I watched as she eventually aged out of the system and found shelter in small back quarters at a drive-up motel with a diner where she worked as a waitress.

The series of visions ended with the woman with green eyes sipping wine from a stemmed

glass and reading aloud from a book under soft lamp light. Her audience of one was Dane Landomunn who was lounging in a reclining chair cozily oriented to her left.

“You okay, Hun?” the woman with the green eyes said to me with her hand placed compassionately on my shoulder.

I squirmed out of the way of her touch, and she withdrew her hand like she had touched something blistering.

“How did you know?” I let slip out of my mouth, barely noticing I had vocalized anything.

“About the cashews?” the woman asked with a nervous chuckle. “They’re my favorite. Don’t’ tell Dane, but I’ve been addicted to them for years.”

“Cashews?” I murmured as if I’d never heard that word before. My mind was jumbled. I thought about Linda those many weeks ago and that urgent wave of protectiveness overcame me again for this woman with the green eyes. I recounted how many other helpers there had been since Linda. Dane Landomunn had a type. He seemed drawn to a bruised spirit with miraculous resilience. One who also was captured in the throes of being too tired to resist any more of life’s challenges. Did he view himself a savior or a

predator? Was there even a difference? Who benefited more, and was there even a way to tell? The sheer number of them in aggregate felt like an obsessive collection itself. His own greedy compulsion. It was like he was ensnared in a cruel and looping cycle of his own making. Much like the woman with the green eyes, he would find himself in a helpless repetition where the only thing that could stop it would be for him to run out of time.

“How ...?” I stuttered. “How did you know not to get too tangled up with Dane Landomunn?”

“Tangled up?” the woman with the green eyes asked warily. “Dane and I are close. We go back many years, not that it should concern you,” she said as courteously as you can to someone who has overstepped basic social boundaries.

“I just get the impression he’s someone who should be kept, I don’t know ... at arm’s length, you know?”

“Oh, Dane’s harmless,” the woman with the green eyes assured. “He’s a good guy. He’s got a good heart.” The woman with the green eyes looked over at Dane Landomunn and gestured toward the line of people waiting to talk to him as if that was some sort of empirical proof of his righteous character.

“Let’s just say,” I said, leaning in, “he seems to really go through women.” I paused for effect. “I’ve been coming here for years and ... I have to say, I have never seen the same woman twice.”

“Ah, yes.” The woman with the green eyes tilted her head back and laughed with the type of delight of someone sharing an inside joke. “Dane has always had a way with the ladies.” She chuckled again and seemed to drift off in a memory I didn’t have access to. “He’s just coping.” She paused and offered me intense eye contact that sent a shudder of staticky energy through me. “Some wounds never heal,” she said gravely. “His mother abandoned him at a bus station when he was three. A security guard found him underneath a lobby chair and brought him to the same youth home where I lived most my childhood. We were just kids living in the system.” Then her face melted back into a smile. “I was so happy for him when the Landomunns adopted him. Every kid deserves a good home, you know? Dane took to farming like a champ. It was like he had it in his blood. I got to spend a lot of time at the farm too, so it worked out well for the both of us!”

“Oh,” I said feeling simultaneously surprised and defeated. I pursed my lips with regret of

having opened them in the first place. As I slowly backed away, an old adage my grandmother used to repeat ad nauseum crawled across my mind. “Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see.” My grandmother issued the saying like a commandment whenever the mood would strike her.

I left the woman with the green eyes and deliberately walked past Dane Landomunn for a reason that escaped me. Was I trying to feel his energy? Was I trying to see him with this new lens? Did I want to cling to my earlier assessment of him and was looking for more evidence that would support my judgement? I just didn’t know. He’d been chatting with an older man in a Hang Loose tank top, cargo shorts, and flip flops who was holding several bags of mismatched produce.

“... It’s like having an itch you can never scratch,” I overheard Dane Landomunn express to Mr. Hang Loose.

“Isn’t it just like life to always be moving the goal posts?” Mr. Hang Loose pontificated.

The men laughed, then Dane Landomunn punctuated, “Since when did cutting a few corners hurt anyone? ... and they vilify guys like us when we need to change the rules as we go!”

“Don’t you know it!” Mr. Hang Loose agreed.

I walked away and made my way through the rest of the farmers market. The crowd had grown uncomfortably dense, yet I allowed myself to make eye contact with a few attendees. I could start to see individual people rather than just one solid swarm. I could see the bags they carried, and the carts stuffed with leafy items that they gleefully wheeled behind them. I wondered what other heavy burdens they carted with them as well. The burdens that are hidden but weigh them down just the same. I saw a prism of light that cast long rays of illuminated histories beam out from each person like a radiated aura. A thick stew of memories, experiences and traumas, troubles as well as triumphs locked inside the humans walking right in front of me.

I went and ordered a blueberry shake. I sucked down my first sip and then took the rest home with me.