Author: Martin

Make Room 4 Joy: Never a Dull Moment at Arbor Ring Farm, Part 2

Word Count: 162

Cumulative: 526

Joy and the other mature potatoes couldn’t believe their eyes. Hundreds of new potatoes were frolicking skinless and wild between barn and yard, seemingly bruised and blissfully unaware of the consequences of their youthful yet destructive behavior on the farm’s bottom line.

Self-identifying poletons, Arbor Ring Farm’s latest crop of young spuds took the unorthodox mannerisms and outré fashions of local fringe skeleton culture to the extreme, going so far as to disavow their skin-ness and mutilate their flesh in a rebellious move to look less potato- and more skeleton-like. Arbor Ring would be lucky to sell them cooked or fried to pig farms, let alone unprocessed to area food pantries, in their scandalous and unmarketable state.

Inside the barn, in a corner behind a hay bale, Joy discovered an industrial-sized potato rumbler—a wicked piece of equipment long banned in the county—ringed by scores of spent iodine injection syringes. Although not one to point the fingerling, she had her suspicions.

Make Room 4 Joy: The Secret Ingredient

Word Count: 134

Cumulative: 364

By the time she arrived at the tent, the judges had already awarded Joy the Blue Ribbon for best organic potato at the county fair. Appointed in a gesture of goodwill, the judges—all of them from the community’s skeleton minority—were absolutely giddy with anticipation about solving the horticultural mystery behind the prize plant.

The luscious green foliage, flawless blue-violet blossoms, and well-shaped berries attracted their attention, but it was the tuber’s balanced starchiness, slightly creamy yet slightly dense texture, and silky smooth skin that stuck in the jurists’ mandibles and earned their highest gastronomic praise.

When asked the question on everyone’s cranium, Joy demurred. “Secret ingredient.” Nobody dead in that tent that afternoon needed to know that she fertilized her prize-winning potato plant with locally sourced bone meal in scandalously large amounts.

Make Room 4 Joy: Never a Dull Moment at Arbor Ring Farm

Word Count: 123

Cumulative: 230

The Tuberson family farmhands had started picking potatoes after dusk to beat the arrival the next day of an unusually hot Indian summer. By four in the morning, Joy was standing in the middle of a field at Arbor Ring Farm trying to figure out what went wrong with the haulm topper and harvester.

Too many rocks near the surface? She wondered. Both pieces of machinery had failed in spectacular fashion. She knew better than to try to fix them in the dark. She’d wait until dawn.

A rooster crowed. The yawning mid-September sun rose golden over the fields, illuminating a wasteland of scraped and scattered glowing yellow bones—all that remained of a decimated family of skeletons violently aroused and dismembered overnight.

Make Room 4 Joy: This Potato Has Eyes

Word Count: 107

Missy and her clique of morbidly skinny bitches were all that stood between her and the front door. Joy could tell from the tortured looks on their wasted bony faces that they resented her full-bodied beauty and voluptuous curves.

But they were no match for Joy Tuberson, whose family had deep roots in their small farming community.

« Love the tiara, Missy. Especially the amulet. »

« Uh, thanks, Joy. »

Triumphant, Joy crossed the threshold, her delicate violet skin radiant from the rush of anthocyanin.

Another good day, she thought to herself, for this root vegetable locked in epic battle against a veritable army of skeletons.

Pandemonium

Pandemonium: A Mr. Funny Bones Days of Our Past Lives COVID-19 Reunion, first appeared on Facebook on May 11, 2020.

“Pandemonium, the palace of Satan rises, suddenly built of the deep: the infernal peers there sit in council.” —John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Dammit, Janet! Intubate!”
“But Brad, intubate what?! He has no organs!”
“You have two options, kitten: me or the clown with the orange hair.”
“You bet I’m back at work. I have a family to feed. I can’t sit at home and play dead forever.”
“No, kitten. Regardless of what the orange-haired clown says, bleaching your bones won’t protect you against the coronavirus. All that’ll get you is access to the nice country clubs and a spot in a display case in the history museum.” 
“We don’t foresee any issues with our social distancing policy either at corporate or here in our showrooms. We’ve all been six feet under before.”
“SKULLY’S HAS TOILET PAPER !!”
“Super Spreader? Isn’t that what they call you at school, Missy?”
“All indicators point to this crock-pot of creamy chipped beef and cheese as the proximal origin of the virus, Chief.”

“Good gravy! Is it contagious?”

“We’re not sure yet if it’s gravy or if it’s contagious, Chief. We’re forensic scientists, not gourmet epidemiologists.”

Into the Vulgate

If 16th- and 17th-century European genre paintings could talk, what would they say today? How would they say it? How could they say it in a language everyday people would understand? And if a painting talks in a museum, do the other paintings hear it? And if the other paintings hear it, what do they say? And do sculptures hear it, too, or do they only hear their own kind? Now, at the present time, more than ever before the time just passed … hm hm hm time passages doo doo dee doo (Al Stewart) … art appreciation even in its basest form is most rudimentary, nay, necessary.

“Into the Vulgate” first appeared on Facebook in early November 2015.