Make Room 4 Joy: It’s Not Nice to Fool Mother Chip!

Word Count: 336

Cumulative: 1,158

Mother Chip took a victory lap around her picture gallery. All her progeny were there, skelekin immortalized on canvases set in gilt frames suspended on dank, dusty damask. Chief Birdygo. Rich the CSI Guy. Nurse Janet and Brad the Surgeon. Pirate, Cruz, Coco, and Amazing Grace. Chica Mutante and her useless brother, Alejandro (Mother Chip made them share a single canvas and frame). Those androgynous Terranean burkini models, Inané and Insané (also jammed into a single frame). The guys from Bin 206. That buffoon of a clown dentist, Dirty Rich. That impossible granddaughter of hers, Missy (more about her below). And of course, her favorite grandson, Butterscotch, whom she loved more than death itself.

Why should she care that thousands of potatoes and skeletons from some other clan in some nearby Podunk farm town were on the brink of mutual assured destruction?

With the help of that unwitting lascivious clown dentist, Mother had succeeded in getting rid of Allie, that freak of a mermaid skeleton, before she could pollute the gene pool of Mother’s storied Chip clan. Mother tittered as she thought about how much easier it was this time round to manipulate that potato head of a potato-farming potato Joy into carrying out her plan.

Unrelated events, the urban encroachment and massacre of that skeleton family at Arbor Ring Farm set the community on edge, handing Mother the perfect pretext for sowing division and enlisting Joy as her stooge. The potato rumbler in the barn—Mother’s idea—stoked distrust. The not-so-secret meeting of potato diseases—also her idea—triggered genuine alarm and the fatal calls to arms.

How different things would have unfolded had Missy just heeded her grandmother’s advice and stopped fooling around with the other kind. But Missy, always impossible, ignored her counsel and kept spreading her pubic symphysis secretly for one young spud after another in a neighboring town.

“A Potato Chip in the family?!” Mother Chip had asked herself upon uncovering Missy’s deception, shaken by the ramifications. “Over my dead body!”

THE END