Tuesday, January 22, 2013

For Steve and his next crop of tomatoes

i discovered this season the plants that looked like deadly nightshade were actually potatoes. So i dug them up. Most of them were small but perfectly formed, as they say. Except this one. In the style of Stephen King via Brian de Palma as written for Beyond the Darklands* i give you....

Evil Potato.
Evil Potato never had a chance. Planted on 31 October by Halloween Jack, the Gothic Gardener, he came from a bad seed. Trapped in an underground hell, he waited, grew in his own sad stunted fashion, and nurtured his misery and loathing. He never got on with his fellows. They teased him for his looks, fat white things they were, conventional potatoes who could never understand his twisted genius. Finally it seemed that his moment had come. He felt the tug on the vine, the other potatoes swung up and out and away, and he was torn up after them. Struck by light, he was by no means enlightened. He was still unable to shine as befitted a potato of his extraordinary mind, but instead he was crowded in a basin, jostled, unnoticed. Then the worst trauma of all, as he watched his fellows boiled alive in front of him. All idealism, all hope for the warmth and nourishment of potatokind, died, in that kitchen, on that day.

And there he languishes. Saved from the chopping board, but to what end? He dare not go back to the garden. He cannot go back. He sits on the window sill, face caught for ever with that ghastly rictus of a grin, the Joker of potatoes. He watches, in fact he does more than watch, he presides over the kitchen and its inhabitants. One day, one momentous day, he will wash away the horrors with a new rain of tap water, and down the drain he will go, back to the darkness that nurtured him, and the bad seed will grow again.



* Beyond the Darklands is a TV series by psychologist Nigel Latta about psychologically damaged criminals. This post also has a hint of Taxi Driver, if you like.

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