Child’s Garden of Flesh-eating Plants

Meredith Cherry, 29, sits in a rocking chair by a window in a mental hospital in A Child’s Garden of Flesh-eating Plants, speaking to her daughter, 10, whom we do not see.  She tells her daughter that anything she says may be the blathering of ghosts who are always whispering obscenities in her ear.  She lists a series of absurd rules and tells the girl her father was pushed under a train by the Creature From The Black Lagoon in the autumn of 1954.  She says her daughter looks like a picture of her and she says she remembers an educational film called ‘A Field Trip to a Fish Hatchery.”  She got very sad as she watched the thousands of little fish swimming in huge overcrowded tanks and realized that she and the children with her were also being raised so somebody, God, could eat them.  She says she started screaming to let the little fishes out and her Grandfather had to take her away from school.  She tells her daughter that God and Satan are insane Siamese twins, that the garden God planted is poison, and the plants will eat her flesh.  She tells the girl to run and hide and stay away from water.  She asks if the girl can hear the sound of the train in the night and the light fades out.