Bentley Little - The Collection

But that wasn't possible.

He walked back to the house, ate, showered, dressed, and went to the foot of the drive where he put up a chain be­tween the two flanking trees and hung a sign which read: Closed for the Day.

There were chores to be done, crops to be watered, ani­mals to be fed, work to be completed.

But he did none of these things. He sat alone on a small bucket next to the potato, staring at it, hypnotized by its pul­sations, as the sun rose slowly to its peak, and then dipped into the west.

Murial was lying beside him, not moving, not talking, not even touching him, but he could feel her warm body next to his and it felt right and good. He was happy, and he reached over and laid a hand on her breast. "Murial," he said. "I love you."

And then he knew it was a dream, even though he was still in it, because he had never said those words to her, not in the entire thirty-three years they had been married. It was not that he had not loved her, it was that he didn't know how to tell her. The dream faded into reality, the room around him growing dark and old, the bed growing large and cold. He was left with only a memory of that momentary happi­ness, a memory which taunted him and tortured him and made the reality of the present seem lonelier and emptier than even he had thought it could seem.

Something had happened to him recently. Depression had graduated to despair, and the tentative peace he had made with his life had all but vanished. The utter hopelessness which had been gradually pressing in on him since Murial's death had enveloped him, and he no longer had the strength to fight it.

His mind sought out the potato, though he lacked even the energy to look out the window to where it lay in the field. He thought of its strangely shifting form, its white slimy skin, its even pulsations, and he realized that just thinking of the object made him feel a little better.

What was it?

That was the question he had been asking himself ever since he'd found the potato. He wasn't stupid. He knew it wasn't a normal tuber. But neither did he believe that it was a monster or a being from outer space or some other such movie nonsense.

He didn't know what it was, but he knew that it had been affecting his life ever since he'd discovered it, and he was almost certain that it had been responsible for the emotional roller coaster he'd been riding the past few days.

He pushed aside the covers and stood up, looking out the window toward the field. Residual bad feelings fled from him, and he could almost see them flying toward the potato as if they were tangible, being absorbed by that slimy white skin. The potato offered no warmth, but it was a vacuum for the cold. He received no good feelings from it, but it seemed to absorb his negative feelings, leaving him free from de­pression, hopelessness, despair.

He stared out the window and thought he saw something moving out in the field, blue in the light of the moon.

***

The box was still in the field, but the potato was lying on the gravel in front of the house. In the open, freed from the box, freed from shoots and other encumbrances, it had an al­most oval shape, and its pulsing movements were quicker, more lively.

The farmer stared at the potato, unsure of what to do. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he had been half hop­ing that the potato would die, that his life would return to normal. He enjoyed the celebrity, but the potato scared him.

He should have killed it the first day.

Now he knew that he would not be able to do it, no mat­ter what happened.

"Hey!" Jack Phelps came around the side of the house from the back. "You open today? I saw some potential cus­tomers driving back and forth along the road, waiting."

The farmer nodded tiredly. "I'm open."

Jack and his wife invited him to dinner, and the farmer accepted. It had been a long time since he'd had a real meal, a meal cooked by a woman, and it sounded good. He also felt that he could use some company.

But none of the talk was about crops or weather or neigh­bors the way it used to be. The only thing Jack and Myra wanted to talk about was the potato. The farmer tried to steer the conversation in another direction, but he soon gave up, and they talked about the strange object. Myra called it a creature from hell, and though Jack tried to laugh it off and turn it into a joke, he did not disagree with her.

When he returned from the Phelps's it was after mid­night. The farmer pulled into the dirt yard in front of the house and cut the headlights, turning off the ignition. With the lights off, the house was little more than a dark hulking shape blocking out a portion of the starlit sky. He sat un-moving, hearing nothing save the ticking of the pickup's en­gine as it cooled. He stared at the dark house for a few moments longer, then got out of the pickup and clomped up the porch steps, walking through the open door into the house.

The open door?

There was a trail of dirt on the floor, winding in a mean­dering arc through the living room into the hall, but he hardly noticed it. He was filled with an unfamiliar emotion, an almost pleasant feeling he had not experienced since Murial died. He did not bother to turn on the house lights but went into the dark bathroom, washed his face, brushed his teeth, and got into his pajamas.

The potato was waiting in his bed.

He had known it would be there, and he felt neither panic nor exhilaration. There was only a calm acceptance. In the dark, the blanketed form looked almost like Murial, and he saw two lumps protruding upward which looked remarkably like breasts.

He got into bed and pulled the other half of the blanket over himself, snuggling close to the potato. The pulsations of the object mirrored the beating of his own heart.

He put his arms around the potato. "I love you," he said.

He hugged the potato tighter, crawling on top of it, and as his arms and legs sank into the soft slimy flesh, he realized that the potato was not cold at all.

The Murmurous Haunt of Flies

I'm not a poetry fan. Never have been, never will be. But while suffering through a graduate class on the Romantic poets, the phrase "the murmurous haunt of flies" leaped out at me while we were reading John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." I thought it was a great line and wrote it down.

Some time later, I found myself thinking of my great-grandmother's chicken ranch in the small farm­ing community of Ramona, California. She'd died years before, and I hadn't been there in a long time, but I remembered a little adobe banya or bathhouse on the property that used to scare me (this bathhouse pops up again in my novel The Town). I remembered as well that there had always been flies everywhere— because of the chickens—and I recalled seeing fly­paper and No-Pest Strips that were black with bug bodies. The Keats phrase returned to me, a light went on, and I wrote this story.

***

"Stay away," my grandpa told me. "It is a haunted place, strange with secrets."

He had lived on the farm all his life, was born on the farm and would die on the farm. He knew what he was talking about. And as we sat in the old kitchen, chairs pushed up against the now-unused icebox, we grew afraid. I suddenly felt a wave of cold pass through me, though the temperature in the farmhouse was well over ninety degrees, and I saw multiple ripples of gooseflesh cascade down Jan's bare arms. Neither of us exactly believed the tale, but we were ur-banites, out of our element, and we respected the knowledge and opinions of the locals. We knew enough to know we knew nothing.

He struggled out of his chair and, one hand on his gimp leg, hobbled over to the screen door. The fine mesh of the screen was ripped in several places, from human accidents and feline determination, and a small covey of flies was traveling back and forth, in and out of the house. He stood there for a minute, not speaking, then beckoned us over. "Come here. I want to show it to you."