Willful Creatures Part 4

"Stop," she says, laying her head on my chest. "I can hear you doing that."

"No," I tell her, not touching her yet; I won't touch her yet.

She presses her face down hard. I stroke her head with my available elbow and her hair is s.h.i.+ning like gold in the sunlight through the unopened window. It all makes me very sleepy.

"The thing is," she says, voice m.u.f.fled out through my T-s.h.i.+rt, "what I said before, you know, never again, I can't really promise that."

"I know," I say.

"I don't really know what will happen."

"I know." I wrap the floss around my index finger like a ring and watch the blood s.h.i.+ft. The tip of my finger turns waxy and purple.

"What would I do without you?" she says, and I get the floss around my wrist this time.

"Same thing," I say as my hand darkens.

When I go to bed I think of Frieda but after a while I get bored. I don't know what Frieda's like. Janie, who I do know, is asleep. All her pill bottles are locked up in the trunk, and I own the key. It'll take her a while this time to find where I hid the key; I'm getting better and better at stumping her. Last month it was floating in the bag of walnuts, and it would've taken a long time for her to find it except I forgot that she loves walnuts. Now we both hate them; Janie because of the taste in her mouth, me because when I found her, they were scattered all over the floor surrounding her and for a second I actually thought they were tiny shriveled lungs with all the air sucked out of them.

This time, the key is hidden under the bathroom counter. Where the lip of the counter rises above the floor? I have taped it. You only notice if you're lying flat down on the bathroom rug, relaxing, or if you're running your hand along the rim. So this round should take at least a few months. One of these days, I'll just do my duty and make a scene and dump all the pills down the toilet like I'm supposed to and Janie will cry and cry and then find herself a new boyfriend.

Until then, it's our best time together. She plays with my hair. She sits on the sofa in the slanted light with her guitar and sings songs with my name in them that she makes up on the spot. When she was six, she won that beauty contest talent compet.i.tion by singing "These Boots Are Made for Walking" with a pretend guitar slung around her shoulder and a dance routine. All the adults cheered as she stomped about in her country-western outfit. All the other kids started crying backstage when they heard the thunderous applause. We still have the trophy; it's locked inside the trunk with the pills tucked inside the cup part like a sordid story in a celebrity magazine at the airport. The boots she wore are in there too; they're really little, made of thin yellow leather with fringe on top and a silver badge on the side. I didn't have anything special to add, but just to be fair, I put my report cards from junior high school in the trunk too. I got all As. I have always been a good student.

The pumpkinhead couple got married. They had been dating for many years and by now she was impatient. "I'm getting cooked," she told him, and she took his hand up her neck to the inside of her head so he could feel the warmth of the flesh there, how it was growing soft and meaty with time; he reeled from both burden and arousal. Taking her hand, they walked over to the big soft bed and while he unb.u.t.toned her dress, he thought about what she was asking for and thought it was something he could give her. He slipped his belt out of the loops and the waist of his pants sighed and fell open. When the pumpkinheads had s.e.x, it was at a slight angle so that their heads would not b.u.mp.

They had a big wedding with a live jazz band, and she gave birth to two children in the span of four years, each with its own small pumpkinhead, a luminous moon of pumpkin, one more yellowish, one a deep dark orange. The pumpkinhead mother became pregnant with her third child in the seventh year, and walked around the house rubbing her belly, particularly the part that bulged more than the rest. At the hospital, on birth day, the nurses swaddled the baby in a blanket and presented him to her proudly, but she drew in her breath so fast that the pumpkinhead father, in the waiting room watching basketball, heard through the door. "What is it?" he said, peeking in.

She raised her elbow which cradled the blanket. The third child's head was made of an iron.

It was a silver model with a black plastic handle and when he cried, as he was crying right now, steam sifted up from his shoulders in measured puffs. His head was larger than the average iron and pointed at the tip.

The father stood by his wife and the mother adjusted the point so that it did not poke her breast.

"h.e.l.lo there, little ironhead," she said.

The siblings came running in from the waiting room, following their father, and one burst out laughing and one had nightmares for the rest of her childhood.

The ironhead turned out to be a very gentle boy. He played quietly on his own in the daytime with clay and dirt, and contrary to expectations, he preferred wearing ragged messy clothes with wrinkles. His mother tried once to smooth down his outfits with her own, separated iron, but when the child saw what was his head, standing by itself, with steam exhaling from the flat silver base just like his breath, he shrieked a tinny scream and matching steam streamed from his chin as it did when he was particularly upset. The pumpkinhead mother quickly put the iron away; she understood; she imagined it was much the way she felt when one of her humanhead friends offered her a piece of seasonal pie on Thanksgiving.

"Next year," she told her husband that November, "I am going to host Thanksgiving myself and instead of a turkey I'm serving a big human b.u.t.t."

Her husband was removing his socks one by one, sitting on the edge of the bed, rolling them into a ball.

"And for dessert," continued his wife, stretching out on the comforter, "we will have cheesecake from brains and of course ladyfingers and-" She started laughing then at herself, uproariously; she had a great loud laugh.

Once undressed, her husband lay his head flat on her stomach and she held the wideness of his skull in her hands and smoothed the individual orange panels.

"I think our son is lonely," she said.

They made love on the bed, in a quiet relaxed tangle, then threw on bathrobes and went to check on their children. The two girl pumpkinheads were asleep, one making gurgling dream noises, the other twitching. They shook the second gently until her nightmare switched tracks and she calmed. Shutting the door quietly behind them, the parents held hands in the peace of the hallway, but when they stepped into the ironhead's room, they found him wide awake, smoothing his pillowcase with his jaw.

"Can't you sleep, honey?" asked his mother. He shook his head. He had no eyes to look into, but the loll of his neck and the throw of his small body let them know he was upset. They sat beside him and told a story about zebras and licorice. He tucked his head agreeably on the pillow and listened the whole time, but his parents tired before he did and tiptoed out of the room, figuring he was asleep. No. He never slept, not because he didn't want to but simply because he couldn't, he didn't know how. He spent a few more hours staring at the wall, feeling the sharp metal of his nose, breathing out clouds into the cramped sky of his bedroom. Around three in the morning, he read a picture book. At five, he snuck to the kitchen and had a snack of milk and cookies. He felt very very tired for four years old.

At school, the ironhead made no friends because he was expected to be a tough guy due to the sharpness of that metal point, but he was no tough guy and preferred the sandbox to the gra.s.s field. He filled buckets with sand and then submerged them in sand. One afternoon, tired of being teased by the seas of children with human heads and his sisters who escaped ridicule by being the best at every sport, he left the playground by himself and went for a walk. He walked past the residential area of town, with the friendly rickety houses and their green-yellow lawns and an occasional free-standing mailbox in the shape of a cow or a horse. He walked past the milkman, whose arms were full with gla.s.s bottles of frothy white, all set to be delivered, and who laughed at the iron-head, which just made steam rise from the boy's neck. He walked until he reached a big field, one he'd never seen before. Beyond it was a building. Glancing around, the ironhead crossed the field, lifting his little legs high to clear the tall patches of weeds, and the air was s.h.i.+fting smell now, it smelled bigger than the town did, pollen riding on wide open s.p.a.ce, immigrant seedlings.

When he reached the building he saw that it was an appliance shop. COME ON IN! it said on a sign in the window, so he reached high and opened the gla.s.s door and entered. This wasn't a large store, but it was the largest he had ever seen, bright white with fluorescent light like the inside of a tooth. He walked down the four aisles slowly, hands in his pockets, pa.s.sing blenders and sewing machines and vacuums and toasters. Finally he came across the a.s.sortment of irons in the middle of aisle three, and here he stopped. There were four or five different styles, some in boxes with photos on them, some freestanding, chin up. He settled himself down across from the irons and looked up at them. He imagined it was a family reunion. h.e.l.lo, everybody. Nice to see you. He greeted his aunt, his uncle, his cousins. Reaching out, he took the boxes from the shelves one by one and set them in a semicircle around him. They were silent and price tagged and cold company. The ironhead sat there all day long, from ten in the morning to four in the afternoon, breathing a slow hush of steam, and no one in the store even talked to him. Finally the cas.h.i.+er's boss entered, and when he found out how long the ironhead had been there, he called the police. "This is not a public park," he said. "We are trying, after all, to make some money here." In ten minutes, the cop car pulled up, and the two policemen walked over to the ironhead sitting quietly in aisle three trying to take that ever-elusive nap. One cop laughed out loud and the other pretended to pull out his gun in fake terror. "You never know what you're going to see in this podunk town," the laughing one said. "Got any wrinkles on your s.h.i.+rt there, mac?" His partner smirked. The ironhead leaned down and put his head on the white tile so that the boxes of irons rose over him like buildings.

The cas.h.i.+er, who was not unkind, put in a call to the iron-head's worried parents; they drove right on over, hurried in, hugged their son close. One of the policemen cracked a Halloween joke which made the mother livid but she was more concerned when she saw the half-moon of irons around her son's head; she asked him what it meant on the drive home but he just shook his head, snuggling against her warm hip. That night, he lay in bed awake again, for the thousandth night of insomnia, listening to the sounds of his sisters and parents sleeping in the next rooms, which was the most lonesome sound in the world, and by morning was so exhausted, down to the root of his bone, that he begged to stay home from school. Because she loved him dearly, almost more so because he had been a complete and utter surprise, his mother gave him a good lunch of hot dogs and potato chips and chili and milk, set him in front of the TV with a blanket, and left for work herself.

When she came home at five, her ironhead was dead. He was in front of the TV with his ironhead turned toward the sofa, away from the screen, and when he didn't respond to her inquiries, she went to check on him, listening for his breath in its small steamy gasps, and she heard nothing coming out of him at all. She was so used to the slow steady hushed sound of his breathing that it was only the abrupt silence of him that convinced her he wasn't there anymore. She crumpled by his side and held him close and cried and cried and when the little girls came home from soccer practice they didn't know what to do and couldn't stand to watch their mother crying like that and so they got mad at each other and screamed and kicked on the front lawn. The mother held her little ironhead close and his body felt cool and distant. She stroked down the plastic handle and when her husband came home she nearly fell against him.

The doctor who came by that night to state the cause of death said that the ironhead had died of utter exhaustion, that it had nothing to do with the chili or the journey across the field or the iron in boxes or the laughing policemen. He weighed the iron and said that the weight of it was completely out of proportion with the rest of the body, and that it was frankly incredible that the boy had lived at all, carrying a head like that around all day. "This is rock-solid iron, and you can imagine-" he declared. The mother stood still as a stone; the father nodded slowly. The doctor didn't finish his sentence, and bowed his head in the face of their grief. The pumpkinhead family buried the ironhead in the cemetery which was only a few blocks away, and at the funeral, children from the school filled buckets with dirt and then submerged them in dirt. A few well-meaning but thoughtless types brought irons to put on his grave, but the mother, her body taut and loosening at the same time, flung them as far away as she could, flying irons, until they crashed among the trees, shading boat-shaped imprints into the earth. One thrifty mourner secretly collected them and took them with her and sold them for half price back to the appliance shop where they crowded the aisle, chins up. The pumpkinhead family sat together at the cemetery and the mother kept uncovering dishes of warm food so she could release steam on his grave, because she wanted to give him voice, to give him breath again.

For many weeks, all they ate were the ca.s.seroles brought by the neighbors. When they ran out of those, the mother went into the kitchen, gathered ingredients, and made spaghetti. She was slow and heavied, but she did it, and the family ate together that night: four. While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.

Thirty years later when the girls were having their own children, they had mostly pumpkinheads, but the recessive gene did rear its head once more and the second daughter's third child emerged with the head of a teapot. This seemed less difficult to live with than a pointy heavy head of iron and the teapothead child did just fine, made many friends, and slept without trouble. She breathed steam just like her uncle had, and so they sometimes called her ironhead as a pet name even though it didn't fit. She was very good at soccer. The mother and father pumpkinhead still visited the cemetery regularly and sat there with their backs against the dates of their child's birth and death and the mother said, "I can feel my head softening," and the father said, "My shoulders are shrinking and my knuckles are growing," and they sat with their heads orange globes against the gray stone and green gra.s.s and after a few hours walked home together.

G.o.d put a gun to the writer's head.

I'm making a rule, said G.o.d. You can't write another word or I'll shoot you. Agreed? G.o.d had an East Coast accent, tough like a mobster, but his lined face was frail and ethereal.

The writer agreed. He had a wife and family. He was sad because he loved words as much as he loved people, because words were the way he said what he wanted about people, but this was G.o.d and G.o.d was the real deal, and he didn't want to spend too much time dwelling on it. So he packed up his typewriter and paper and tucked them in the hall closet, and within two days, to comfort his loss, went to the art supply store and bought oil paints and a canvas and a palette and set up in the garage among the old clothes and broken appliances. He'd always liked painting. He thought he had a good sense of color. He painted every morning for hours, until he started to paint something real.

He was working on his eighteenth canvas, blues and browns in sharp rows blurring in the middle, making a confrontation with black, when G.o.d entered his studio, this time holding a dagger.

Cut the painting too, said G.o.d. No words, no images. OrHe made a slicing motion near his stringy throat.

Why? cried the painter, already missing the sharp smell of the oils, how the colors mixed to become brand new again, an exotic blush of yellow, a bluish gray, a new way to show trees, with white! He missed the slow time he took was.h.i.+ng his hands with turpentine, the way his wife praised the new rugged scent of him.

G.o.d lifted the dagger to the lightbulb of the garage and it glinted, unpolished silver, speckled with brown. Do not question G.o.d, said G.o.d.

So the painter packed away his paints, inside that hall closet, next to the typewriter and reams of white paper. He felt a deep pang, but within a week signed up for a drama cla.s.s, held in a church where the ceilings were high, the air cool, and every scene took on particular gravity with those stained-gla.s.s windows acting as set. He played a few roles, and he wasn't very good at first but was enjoying it anyway, shy man that he was, liking the way he would feel his feeling and then use it and look around at the other people in the cla.s.s, faces split into red-and-yellow triangles from the windows, and see they were feeling the same feeling with him, how contagious it all was. He needed a lot of rea.s.surance as an actor but he was starting to understand its ultimate camaraderie and loneliness, the connection which is tight as laces then broken quick as the curtain's fall.

So of course one afternoon, walking out of the church, spanking a new script against his knee, he found G.o.d in the backseat of his car, gripping a bayonnet.

No more, G.o.d said. In my house no less, said G.o.d.

The actor started to cry. I love acting, he said. I'm just getting it right, he said. My wife thinks I'm coming out of my sh.e.l.l.

G.o.d shook his head.

Mime? the man pleaded.

G.o.d poked the actor's side with the sweet triangular tip of the bayonnet.

The actor sat in the car, gripping the steering wheel, already missing the applause, the sight of the woman in the front row with tears in her eyes that were from the same pool of tears he'd visited to do the scene, the entire town fetching water from the same well.

The actor was depressed for a while which his wife didn't like much, but finally he slogged himself out of it and took up cooking. He studied the basics in the cookbook and told himself that patience was a virtue and would be put to good use here. Sure enough, in three months, he'd made his first soup from scratch-potato leek nutmeg-and it was very good. His wife loved it. You're amazing, she told him in bed, his hands smelling of chicken guts; I married the most amazingly artistic man, she said.

He kissed her. He'd made a dessert too and brought it into bed-a chocolate torte with peanut b.u.t.ter frosting. He kissed her again. After two bites the torte fell, unnoticed, to the floor.

G.o.d was apparently busy, he took longer this time, but showed up after a big dinner party where the chef served leg of lamb with rosemary on a bed of wild rice with lemongra.s.s chutney. It was a huge hit, and everyone left, drunk, gorgeous with flush, blessed. The chef's wife went to the bathroom and guess who sauntered through the screen door, swinging a noose.

No! moaned the chef, was.h.i.+ng a dish. No!

This is it, said G.o.d. Stop making beautiful food. What is with you?

The chef hung his head. Then hung up his spoons in the cupboard with the typewriter, paints, playbooks and wigs. With the pens, turpentine, and volumes of Shakespeare. The shelf was getting crowded so he had to shove some towels aside to make room. He spent the week eating food raw from the refrigerator, and somehow found the will to dial up a piano teacher. But right when he glimpsed the way a chord works, how it fits inside itself, the most intricate and simple puzzle, when he heard how a fourth made him weep and a fifth made him soar, the cheerleading of C major, the birch trees of D minor, G.o.d returned with a baseball bat tucked into his belt.

Don't even think about it, barked G.o.d.

Dance? Rifle.

Architecture? Grenade.

The man took a year off of life. He learned accounting. He was certain this would be no problem, but after a few weeks the way the numbers made truths about people's lives was interesting to him; he tried law but kept beginning a duet with the jury; chemistry was one wonder after another; even the stock market reminded him of a wriggling animal, and so of course, the usual: pins near the eyes, the closing of the job doors, the removal of the name plaque, the repeated signing of the quitting papers.

So the man sat in a chair. G.o.d had ordered him to stop talking, so he went to a park and just looked at people. A young woman was writing in a blank book under a tree; she was writing and writing, and he caught her eye and sent her waves of company and she kept his gaze and wrote more, looked up again, wrote more, circled his bench and sat down and when she asked him questions he said nothing but just looked at her more, and she stood and went away, got a drink at the water fountain, circled back. After an hour of this, she nodded to him, said Thank You, and left. The pathway of her feet looped to the bench and back and away and back, in swirls and lines.

Shut your eyes! yelled G.o.d.

The man's wife was unhappy. She was doing all the cooking now and her husband didn't move or speak anymore. She missed their discussions, his paintings, his stories, his plies. She missed talking to him about her job with the troubled people, and how at certain moments there was an understanding held between her and the person, sitting there, crying or not crying, mad or not mad, happy or unhappy, bland or lively, and it was like, at that moment, she said, they were stepping all over a canvas together. It's like, she said, the room is full of invisible beetles. Or faucets. Or pillows. Or concrete. She told him all about it and his eyes were closed but she could feel, from his skin, that he was listening. She went to him and undressed him slowly and they made love there on the sofa, and he hardly moved but just pressed his warmth to her, his body into hers, and she held him close and the man gave her all he could without speaking, without barely s.h.i.+fting, lips and hips, and she started to cry.

Afterward she pressed her head to his chest and told him all the things she had thought about, the particular flower he made her feel, the blade, the chocolate torte.

They slept on the sofa together.

G.o.d put the man in a box with no doors or windows. He tied his hands behind his back and knotted a blindfold over his eyes. He stuck duct tape over his lips. G.o.d said: Not a peep out of you. Don't you interact with anybody. The man sat with his head full of dreams. He thought of flying fish and the smell of his wife's skin: white powder and clear sweat. He thought of basil breaking open and the drawing of a tomato with red and black paint and the word tomato, consonant vowel, consonant vowel, consonant vowel, and the perfect taste of tomato with basil, and the rounded curve of a man's back, b.u.t.tons of spine visible. He wondered where the girl with the half-blank book was right then. He thought of his wife making bridges of air over air. He listened to the sound of wind outside the box, loud and steady as his breath.

The next thing in the morning was the cast-iron pot full of potatoes. She had not ordered them and did not remember buying potatoes at the grocery store. She was not one to bake a potato. Someone must have come in and delivered them by accident. Once she'd woken to meadows full of sunflower bouquets all over her house in gla.s.s vases and they turned out to be for the woman next door. Perhaps the woman next door had a new suitor now, one who found something romantic in root vegetables.

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. h.e.l.lo mother, h.e.l.lo father, h.e.l.lo 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 gla.s.s 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 winegla.s.s 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 c.o.c.kamamie 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sortment 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, pus.h.i.+ng 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 cl.u.s.ters 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 s.h.i.+vered. 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 b.u.t.ter and milk to last a week. The nasturtiums were watered.

The smacking sound kept going on by the window. Wet.

It was lunchtime by now, and she was hungry. And you can't just eat b.u.t.ter by itself.

She put the potatoes in the oven again. With their bellies and toes. With their large heads and slim shoulders. She let them bake for an hour and a half, until their skin was crisp and bright brown. Her stomach was churning and rose petals blew along the street as she sat herself down at her kitchen table. It was noon. She used salt and pepper and b.u.t.ter, and a fork and a knife, but they were so much larger now than your average potato, and they were no longer an abstract shape, and she hated potatoes, and the taste in her mouth felt like the kind of stale dirt that has lost its ability to grow anything. She shoved bite after bite into her teeth, to the sound of the neighbor laughing in her kitchen, through such dizziness she could hardly direct the fork into her mouth correctly. She chewed until the food gathered in the spittle at the corners of her lips, until she had finished one entire enormous potato. The other six crackled off the table and spilled onto the floor.

That night, she had a horrible stomachache, and she barely slept. She dreamed of a field of sunflowers and in each pollened center was the face of someone she once knew. Their eyes were closed.

At dawn, when she walked over to the stove, as she did every morning now, pulling her bathrobe tighter around her aching stomach, there were only six potatoes in the pot. Her body jerked in horror. She must have miscounted. She counted them over. Six. She counted again. Six. Again. Six. Six. Again. Six. Her throat closed up as she checked under the stove and behind the refrigerator and around the whole kitchen. Six. She checked all their markings until it was clear which one was missing: the one with the b.u.mpiest head, with the potato eye right on its shoulder blade. She could feel it take shape again inside her mouth. A wave of nausea swept over her throat, and she spent the rest of the day in the corner of the old red couch, choking for breath. She threw up by evening from so much crying, but the seventh potato never came back.

The sunflower fields browned with autumn, and within a month, two other potatoes were expelled from the pot. There was simply not enough room for all six in the pot anymore. She had done nothing this time. She didn't want to put them outside, bare, in the cold, so when they were soft enough, she buried them deep beneath the hibernating nasturtium seeds. They never came back either. The four remaining in the pot seemed to be growing fine but it was unsettling to look in and see only four now; she had grown so used to seven.

By the eighth month it was raining outside and she was having stomach cramps and the potatoes were fully formed, with nails and feet, with eyelids and ears, and potato knots all over their bodies. They rotated their position so that their heads faced the mouth of the pot. On the ninth month, they tumbled out of the pot on the date of their exact birthday, and began moving slowly across the floor. They were silent. They did not cry like regular babies and they smelled faintly of hash browns. She picked them up occasionally, when they stopped on the floor, legs and arms waving, but mostly she kept her distance. They tended to stick together, moving in a clump, opening their potato eyes to pupils the same color as the rest of them.

The four were similar, but you could distinguish them by the distribution of potato marks on their bodies, and so she named them One, Two, Three, and Four. Two also had a tiny wedge missing from its kneecap, in the shape of a cut square.