Our woman checked through her small house but it was empty as ever. She asked her neighbor, the one whose windows were still crowded with flowers, but the neighbor wiped her hands on a red-checkered cloth and said no, they were not for her, and she had not ordered any potatoes from the store either, as she grew her own.
Back at the house, the potatoes smelled normal and looked normal but our woman did not want them around so she threw them in the trash and went about the rest of her day. She swept and squared and pulled weeds from her garden. She walked to the grocery store and bought milk. She was a quiet person, and spoke very few words throughout the afternoon: Thank You, Goodbye, Excuse Me.
The next morning, when she woke up, the potatoes were back. Nestled, a pile of seven, in the cast-iron pot on the stove. She checked her trash and it looked as it had before, with a folded milk carton and some envelopes. Just no potatoes. She picked up all seven again, and took them across the road and pushed them one at a time into the trash Dumpster, listening as they thumped at the bottom of the bin.
During the afternoon she walked past rows of abandoned cabins to her lover’s house. He was in his bedroom, asleep. She crawled into the bed with him and pushed her body against his until he woke up, groggy, and made love to her. She stared at the wall as the craving built bricks inside her stomach, and then she burst onto him like a brief rain in drought season. Afterward, she walked home, and he got ready for his night job of loading supplies into trucks and out of trucks. She stopped by the cemetery on the way home to visit her mother, her father, her brother. Hello mother, hello father, hello brother. Goodbye now.
The next morning, the potatoes had returned. This time she recognized them by the placement of knots and eyes, and she could see they were not seven new potatoes, but the same seven she had, just the day before, thumped into the Dumpster. The same seven she had, just the day before that, thrown into the small garbage of her home. They looked a little smug. She tied them tight in a plastic bag and dropped them next door on the sunflower woman’s front stoop. Then she repotted her plants. For the rest of the day, she forgot all about them, but the next morning, the first thing she checked was that cast-iron pot. And what do you know. And on this day they seemed to be growing slightly, curving inward like big gray beans.
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.