by Aimee Bender
They were bothering her now. Even though she was minutely pleased that they had picked her over the sunflower neighbor, still.
“All right.” She spoke into the pot. “Fine.”
Oven.
On.
Since she did not enjoy the taste of baked potatoes, when they were done she took them into the road and placed all seven crispy purses in a line down the middle. The summer sun was white and hot. At around three, when the few cars and trucks and bicycles came rolling through town, she swayed and hummed at the soft sound of impact, and that night, she slept so hard that she lost her own balance and didn’t wake up at sunrise like usual but several hours into the morning. There was a note slipped under the door from her lover who had come to visit after work. He forgot to write “Love” before his name. He had written “Sincerely” instead.
Settling down to a breakfast of milk and bread, the woman looked into the pot almost as an afterthought. Surely they would not survive the oven and the tires and the road. But. All seven-raw, gray, growing. Her mouth went dry, and she ignored them furiously for the rest of the day, jabbing the dirt with a spade as she bordered the house with nasturtium seeds.
Later that day, she stapled them in a box and lugged them to the post office and mailed them to Ireland, where potatoes belonged. She left no return address. When they were back in the pot the next morning, she soaked them in kerosene, lit them on fire, and kicked them into the hills. When they were back again the next morning, she walked two miles with them in her knapsack and threw them over the county line, into the next county. But they were back again by morning, and again, and again and again, and by the twentieth day, they curved inward even more and had grown sketches of hands and feet.
Her heart pulled its curtain as she held each potato up to the bare hanging lightbulb and looked at its hint of neck, its almost torso, its small backside. Each of the seven had ten very tiny indented toes and ten whispers of fingertips.
Trembling, she left the potatoes in the pot and fled her house as fast as she could. She found no comfort in the idea of seeing her sincere lover so she went to the town tavern and had a glass of beer. The bartender told her a long story about how his late wife had refused to say the word “love” in the house for fear she only had a certain amount of times in a life to say the word “love” and she did not want to ever use them up. “So she said she liked me, every day, over and over.” He polished a wineglass with a dirty cloth. “I like you is not the same,” he said. “It is not. On her deathbed even, she said ‘Darling, I like you.’” He spit in the cloth and swept it around the stem. “You’d think,” he said, “that even if her cockamamie idea were true, even if there were only a certain amount of loves allotted per person, you’d think she could’ve spent one of them then.”
The woman sipped her beer as if it were tea.
“You say nothing,” he said. “I don’t know which is worse.”
On the buzzy walk home, she stopped by the cemetery and on her way to see her family she passed the bartender’s wife’s grave which stated, simply, she was greatly loved.
Back at her house, holding her breath, she sliced all seven potatoes up with a knife as fast as she could. The blade nearly snapped. She could hardly look at the chubby suggestions of arms and legs as she chopped, and cut her own finger by accident. Drunk and bleeding, she took the assortment of tuber pieces and threw them out the window. She only let out her breath when it was over.
One piece of potato was left on the cutting board, so she ate it, and for the rest of the evening she swept the stone floor of her house, pushing every speck of dirt out the door until the floor rang smooth.
She woke at the first light of day and ran into the kitchen and her heart clanged with utter despair and bizarre joy when she saw those seven wormy little bodies, whole, pressed pale gray against the black of the cast iron. Their toes one second larger. She brushed away the tears sliding down her nose and put a hand inside the pot, stroking their backsides.
In the distance, the sunflowers on the hill waved at her in fields of yellow fingers.
August came and went. The potatoes stayed. She could not stand to bother them anymore. By the fourth month, they were significantly larger and had a squareish box of a head with the faintest pale shutter of an eyelid.
Trucks, big and small, rattled through the town but they did not stop to either unload or load up. She hadn’t seen her lover in months. She hadn’t been to the cemetery either; the weeds on her family were probably ten feet high by now.
With summer fading from her kitchen window, the woman saw her neighbor meet up with the latest suitor, yellow petals peeking out from her wrists and collar, collecting in clusters at the nape of her neck. He himself was hidden by armfuls of red roses. They kissed in the middle of the dirt road.
Inside her house, the woman shivered. She did not like to look at so many flowers and the sky was overcast. Pluck, pluck, pluck, she thought. Her entire floor was so clean you could not feel a single grain when you walked across it with bare feet. She had mailed her electricity bill and bought enough butter and milk to last a week. The nasturtiums were watered.
The smacking sound kept going on by the window. Wet.
It was lunchtime by now, and she was hungry. And you can’t just eat butter by itself.
She put the potatoes in the oven again. With their bellies and toes. With their large heads and slim shoulders. She let them bake for an hour and a half, until their skin was crisp and bright brown. Her stomach was churning and rose petals blew along the street as she sat herself down at her kitchen table. It was noon. She used salt and pepper and butter, and a fork and a knife, but they were so much larger now than your average potato, and they were no longer an abstract shape, and she hated potatoes, and the taste in her mouth felt like the kind of stale dirt that has lost its ability to grow anything. She shoved bite after bite into her teeth, to the sound of the neighbor laughing in her kitchen, through such dizziness she could hardly direct the fork into her mouth correctly. She chewed until the food gathered in the spittle at the corners of her lips, until she had finished one entire enormous potato. The other six crackled off the table and spilled onto the floor.
That night, she had a horrible stomachache, and she barely slept. She dreamed of a field of sunflowers and in each pollened center was the face of someone she once knew. Their eyes were closed.
At dawn, when she walked over to the stove, as she did every morning now, pulling her bathrobe tighter around her aching stomach, there were only six potatoes in the pot. Her body jerked in horror. She must have miscounted. She counted them over. Six. She counted again. Six. Again. Six. Six. Again. Six. Her throat closed up as she checked under the stove and behind the refrigerator and around the whole kitchen. Six. She checked all their markings until it was clear which one was missing: the one with the bumpiest head, with the potato eye right on its shoulder blade. She could feel it take shape again inside her mouth. A wave of nausea swept over her throat, and she spent the rest of the day in the corner of the old red couch, choking for breath. She threw up by evening from so much crying, but the seventh potato never came back.
The sunflower fields browned with autumn, and within a month, two other potatoes were expelled from the pot. There was simply not enough room for all six in the pot anymore. She had done nothing this time. She didn’t want to put them outside, bare, in the cold, so when they were soft enough, she buried them deep beneath the hibernating nasturtium seeds. They never came back either. The four remaining in the pot seemed to be growing fine but it was unsettling to look in and see only four now; she had grown so used to seven.
By the eighth month it was raining outside and she was having stomach cramps and the potatoes were fully formed, with nails and feet, with eyelids and ears, and potato knots all over their bodies. They rotated their position so that their heads faced the mouth of the pot. On the ninth month, they tumbled out of the pot on the date of their exact birthday, and began moving slowly acr
oss the floor. They were silent. They did not cry like regular babies and they smelled faintly of hash browns. She picked them up occasionally, when they stopped on the floor, legs and arms waving, but mostly she kept her distance. They tended to stick together, moving in a clump, opening their potato eyes to pupils the same color as the rest of them.
The four were similar, but you could distinguish them by the distribution of potato marks on their bodies, and so she named them One, Two, Three, and Four. Two also had a tiny wedge missing from its kneecap, in the shape of a cut square.
When she left to go mail a letter or pick up some groceries, the potato visitors went to the windows like dogs do, and watched her walk off. When she returned, they were back at the window, or still at the window, waiting. Their big potato heads turning as she walked up and opened the door. Eyes blinking fast to welcome her home. She went through her mail and fell into a corner of the rotting old red sofa and they walked over and put rough hands on her shoulders, her knees, her hair. The five of them spent the winter like that, together in the small house, watching the snow fall. She tried to send them outside, to find their fortune, but they always turned right around and came back. They only slept when she slept, making burbling noises like the sound of water warming up. They were dreamless, and woke once she awoke.
On the first day of spring, the bountiful neighbor came over with lilies woven into her hair, asking to borrow some matches. The woman had the four hide in the bathroom. She tried to talk to the neighbor but had very little to say and instead the neighbor filled the small house with chatter. The neighbor was in love! The neighbor liked the weather! The neighbor asked to use the bathroom and the woman said sorry, her bathroom was broken. The neighbor talked at length about broken bathrooms, and how difficult, and if she, the woman, ever needed to use her bathroom, she was welcome anytime. Thank you. You’re welcome! When the neighbor left, the woman’s ears were ringing. She went into the bathroom to pee and was somehow startled to see the four still in there, blinking beneath the silver towel rack.
“Get,” she said, brushing them off. “Get away from me. Go!”
They bumped out the door and waited in the living room. She put them in the closet and went about her day, and there they stayed, waiting, until the guilt drove her to let them out. The following morning, after a sleepless night where they gazed at her with white pupils, she pushed them out the front door to the side of the house where there was a strip of dirt that the neighbor could not see. The woman picked up her gardening shovel and dug a hole in the earth, as deep as her knee. She looked at One.
“Get in,” she said.
He stepped into the hole.
“Lie down,” she said. He looked up at her with wondering eyes and she filled the hole with dirt over him.
“Go back to where you came from,” she said, as she shoved more dirt over his grayish body. She looked at Two. Built another hole. “Go,” she said, “and don’t you come out,” and her voice shook as she said it. Two hopped in without pause. As did Three and then Four. She filled the holes up fast and then strode into her house and locked the door. Fine, she said to herself. Fine. Fine. FINE. She ate dinner alone and slept alone and woke alone, and the cast-iron pot was empty when she checked. They wouldn’t fit in it anymore anyway. She couldn’t even eat them now, could she? They would just walk right out of the oven, right out of her mouth. Go back to where you came from, she told herself. Thank you, Goodbye, Excuse me. She swept endlessly, and trucks moved past her window.
In the morning, with spring rolling off the hillsides in bright puffs, she went outside to the strip of dirt. No movement at all. She set a rock at each site, one rock for One, two for Two, etc. She sat for long spells, over the course of the next week, and watched the sky drift overhead. It all felt very familiar, and she recognized the shape and texture of her life before, but it was as if someone had put her old life in the laundry and washed it wrong. The color was slightly off. The sleeves were now too short.
At the end of the week, she kicked off the stones and got out her big shovel. Her neighbor was hanging up clothing on her laundry line, green dresses and blue scarves. The wind whisked her hair around.
“How’s that broken bathroom?” she yelled.
“Oh,” said the woman. “Well. There never was any broken bathroom.”
The neighbor raised her eyebrows.
“I was hiding my children from you,” said our woman.
“Children? What children?” said the neighbor, wrapping her neck in a rose-colored scarf. “I had no idea! How sweet! How many? Where are they?”
“I buried them,” said the woman, waving her shovel.
“You what?”
“I buried them,” said the woman. “And now I am going to dig them back up.”
She went to the side of the house, and dug up One first. He sat right when the shovel touched his arm and dirt fell from his face and legs. He blinked at her, as if no time had passed at all, and she held out her hand and pulled him out. She dug up Three, and Four. She thought briefly of leaving Two there forever, letting weeds grow all over him, but the other three were looking at his spot expectantly, so she dug up Two too.
The woman looked at each in turn. The layers of dirt became them.
“Okay,” she said.
They stepped into her open arms, solemn as monks. As they nestled and burrowed into her neck, the neighbor poked her head around corner of the house, draped in a clean sheet.
“Oh!” she said. “Look at this!”
The woman glanced over with Three on her back and Four clinging to her shoe.
“I didn’t think you could be serious,” said the neighbor.
“I am always serious,” said our woman.
The neighbor crouched down and smiled at Four. “Are you okay, honey?” she asked. Four looked past the neighbor and then climbed onto our woman’s back, pushing off One who fell lightly to the ground.
“They look so pale,” said the neighbor, her voice unsure where to drop, into which voice box positioned between curiosity and righteousness. “You might want to call a doctor,” she said. “I know a good one, who can be here within the hour.”
Four curled his hand around our woman’s neck, and began tugging on the lobe of her ear. Our woman barely smiled at her neighbor. It was a smile not made of pity, and it was not made of envy, even though the two had merged, for years now, on her lips. This smile instead was built of a weariness, of the particular quiet of the body after a long bout of weeping or illness. Certain things endured, and somehow she had ended up with four.
From the ground, Two leaped up to swing gently from her wrist.
“They need no doctors,” she said, walking to her front door. “Trust me.”
Inside, the woman dressed the group in clothing even though they had no hair or blood and would never look normal, dressed or undressed. Still she put them in pants and shirts she had sewn herself; in hats and shoes and belts.
She took their slow-moving hands and walked out the door again. They blinked and ducked under the lemony March sun. Already, like clockwork, the very first buds of green were pushing up from the soil, a ring of nasturtiums and dead potato babies to border her house. Halfway down the block, she turned and glanced at the neighbor, who was wearing a straw hat now, planting tomatoes. The four glanced with her. Thinking of the doctor had been a kind idea; she would thank the neighbor later. Living next to abundance was not so awful after all. It was contagious, in its own way.
The rest of the town was quiet and drowsy as the five walked past the cemetery, where they waved to the headstones, and over to the edge of the county. The air smelled ripe with spring. At the county line, the potato children stood by the fence posts and laid their hands on the dirt. They seemed interested, even pleased, by the new setting. They had no traumatic recollections of their past week buried alive. Instead, they brought fingers dusted with soil to their noses and smelled appreciatively.
They all crossed over, and began walking.
A farmer pulling a wheelbarrow full of corn stopped and said hello.
“Good day,” said the woman.
His eyes flicked to the bluish figures at her side, but he was a polite farmer and didn’t say anything.
“How’s the corn?”
“Fine,” said the farmer. “Should be a good growing season. Good weather.”
He kept his eyes steady on her face.
“These are my children,” said the woman, giving him permission to look. “Children,” she said, “say hello to the nice farmer.” The four lifted their hands to touch him, and the farmer, familiar best with things of the earth, felt a wave of fluency, inexplicable, wash through him. His own son ran to catch up with them. “Here’s mine,” he said helplessly.
She shook the boy’s hand, the boy who was fixed on looking at the potato children, and who, the way children do, immediately felt entitled to touch their nubbly elbows.
“Do they talk?” asked the boy, and the woman shook her head, no.
“Do they have magic powers?” asked the boy, and she shook her head again.
“They stay,” she told the boy.
The farmer touched each potato child on the shoulder, and then waved goodbye to return to his work. He gave his son the day off. “Enjoy yourself,” he said, surprised by the pang of longing in his voice. The group walked around the county, trailed by the farmer’s boy; most things were very similar here except for the one movie theater showing a Western. In the interest of novelty, they all went to see it. The farmer’s son ate popcorn. The cowboys rode along the prairie. There was a shoot-out at the saloon. The potato babies found it all amazing, and although they could not eat the popcorn, they clutched handfuls of it in their fat fingers until it dribbled in soft white shapes to the floor.