Cover

This Potato Has Eyes

Never a Dull Moment at Arbor Ring Farm

The Secret Ingredient

Never a Dull Moment at Arbor Ring Farm, Part 2

One Potato, Two Potatoes

Dead Potatoes Party

Tit 4 Tater

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

Word Count: 165

Cumulative: 821

Joy spent the morning shopping online for osteoclasts. Although a longshot, the release of large amounts of human precursor cells on sound asleep skeletons just might trigger resorption on a massive scale and, without the possibility of producing new bone, accelerate their decay. She put 50 million in her cart.

For years, Joy had watched with dismay as one local farm after another gave way to a residential subdivision or an office park. To avaricious developers nothing seemed sacred, not even cemeteries inconveniently consecrated on suddenly commercially desirable property. Urban encroachment on their rural community impacted potato farmer and skeleton in equal measure, and they now found themselves competing against each other for control of their destinies and the same plots of land.

Recent events at Arbor Ring Farm and rumors of a secret convening of infectious potato diseases called their relatively peaceful co-existence into question. If the tensions bubbling beneath the surface were about to erupt in biological warfare, Joy wanted to be prepared.

Word Count: 62

Cumulative: 656

They all showed up as instructed on the invitation, though they had no idea who had invited them or why.

Scab and Rhizoctonia Canker—a.k.a. “Rhizo”—were both there, along with the Scurf twins, Black and Silver. Fusarium Dry Rot and her colorful sister, Pink, made an appearance. And to everyone’s surprise, Early and Late Blight somehow managed to arrive on time.

Word Count: 68

Cumulative: 594

Joy did the math.

One potato weighs an average of eight ounces. Arbor Ring and neighboring farms produce approximately 42,750 pounds of potatoes per acre, or roughly 85,500 potatoes.

One human skeleton weighs an average of 26 pounds. The county cemetery buries approximately 1,000 corpses per acre.

So, although outweighed, per acre during any given growing season, potatoes outnumber skeletons in the community by about 85 to one.