Back in May, the 26th to be exact, my brother sent me a text message:
Here’s a little experiment. You have a story where a character is given a device, maybe a weapon or something. It has a strange look to it. It is simply called the Potato. What does the device look like and what does it do?
Well, four days later I wrote out a little idea that went somewhere. It goes on a journey and ended up in a very surprising place that I didn’t quite expect (it’s somewhat of a joke ending). So I pulled it out this week, did an editing/rewriting pass on it that made it a bit more bearable to read.
And I present it to be read (with the permission of my brother, I do feel like I wrote this for him and then we spit-balled an idea for a collection of other friends’ results from his prompt. That may still happen one day.) through my substack.
The Potato
“If you want to accomplish the impossible, all you have to do is try hard enough.” At least that was the motto that my Uncle Murphy would utter before doing something that would prove obviously stupid afterwards. Like the time he thought he could turn a profit by raising apple snails. He’d brag how these snails could get to be the size of a softball and “Can you imagine how many millions those Frenchie guys would pay for snails this large?”
People would tell him it was impossible to make any money raising snails, but he’d counter with “You ain’t trying hard enough.”
Uncle Murphy figured he’d find a seller online eventually when he bought his few baby snails on a hunch. Then he went to work breeding them. Within three months, his trailer was crawling with them. What he didn’t know at the time was that not only were the snails considered an invasive species but that they often can carry parasites. He ended up developing parasitic meningitis which eventually presented itself at the most inopportune time.
Symptoms start off with a headache and a stiff neck, maybe some occasional nausea. All things that can resemble migraines, which Uncle Murphy brushed off since he had experienced a few when he was a kid. But then one day he noticed that there seemed to be a bit of dullness in his hands. Not a tingling one or even that falling asleep, pinched nerve feeling. But just an odd jolt of dullness.
Well, my Uncle Murphy being a prudent man, brushed it off as sleeping wrong on the couch the night before. He had devoted his whole bedroom as the breeding area for those snails at this point. It wasn’t until he was in the middle of the Walmart that he began to really wonder that maybe it wasn’t just a bad night’s sleep.
Uncle Murphy was pushing a cart through the toy section, looking for a gift for my 12th birthday, when with a sudden fury, his morning glass of orange juice filled his mouth with a surprise spasm. “My cheeks puffed out like a blow fish, a drop or two leaking out of my puckered lips,” he’d tell us. “Before I could even begin to think of where the men’s room was, a second wave came and sprayed my refreshing morning drink all over my cart and half the aisle. I remember thinking ‘Lil’ Sammy wouldn’t be wanting any toys from that aisle now.’”
Some people theorized that Uncle Murphy must have slipped on his own vomit. Having seen the security footage, it was clear that he seemed to lose control of his limbs and he ended up falling headfirst into a wall of toys. These toys were hanging on those metal rods that were all lined up to proudly display the products.
When Uncle Murphy fell forward, a rod skipped off of the left side of his forehead, dragging back across his scalp, leaving a truly nasty scar that he would proudly display for the rest of his days. He’d eventually keep his shaven head after his recovery, having gotten used to the shorn look.
A second rod took Uncle Murphy’s right eye.
He received the treatment he needed for the meningitis after some blood work while he was in the ER. Reports were filed with the Public Health office which led to an investigation of his home. Uncle Murphy’s trailer had to be torched along with all of his earthly possessions, snails included. A huge fine was also levied against him by Fish & Game that he managed to pay off after four years.
Now you might be thinking that there might have been a settlement for Uncle Murphy’s eye, and there was, but that sum got eaten up by the medical costs that saved his life.
With all of that hardship, it would be natural to think Uncle Murphy grew bitter after this experience. But he didn’t. In fact, after the fall, he became the calmest anyone had ever seen him. Uncle Murphy had been known to be a real hard ass when he drank, living up to that motto that he’d come up with on a drunken romp back in his high school days.
But truthfully, Uncle Murphy took those words to heart and decided to do something good with them. Once he had regained most of his bodily functions, he set out to help other people in rehab. He became a counselor at the physical rehab home he had stayed at afterwards. He would tell the patients that it may seem impossible to ever walk again, feed yourself, or even wipe your own ass without someone hovering in the corner. “But you just gotta dig deep and try a little harder each day.”
Some family members were baffled, even went to the doctor and asked if any of the brain trauma from that fall could be the reason for the personality change.
Uncle Murphy’s doctor maintained that of all the areas of the brain that had been affected by either the physical trauma or the meningitis, his personality change was not a result of either. This pissed off a few people I won’t name because one or two of them figured that maybe there could have been more money to be had from another lawsuit.
I personally think that while he hung there with an Optimus Prime toy imprinting on his cheek, orange juice dribbling from his lip, and shit slowly making its way down his leg that Uncle Murphy had his moment of clarity. He realized life was too short to sit around complaining and that maybe he should try doing something else. Maybe he saw god and thought that it lived on Cybertron.
It was my Uncle Murphy’s motto that I’ve found myself coming back to time and again throughout life nowadays. Just random moments that would echo his sentiment perfectly. I’ll be the first to admit, I’ve followed his motto more often than I’d care to. But while it's been hit or miss for my Uncle Murphy, I’ve found that for me and my current situation, Uncle Murphy’s motto actually seems to eventually work out for the best.
A few years ago, I was part of some research project as an undergrad that dealt with unlocking the limitless energy potential of our universe. The head researcher called this project the Quantum Engine, and claimed that the potential energy contained within a potato could provide the energy needs for the entire world for a year. Me and a fellow undergrad, Ziggleman, had wondered if the project leader was from Idaho or something.
At any rate, we ended up nicknaming the project “the Potato” because of the Non Disclosure Agreement we had signed to work on the project. The call for confidentiality as well as the fact that it seemed kinda funny that it was a potato that would save the world and reverse climate change was the reason for that nickname. A fucking potato.
While everyone knew the overall goal of the project, most of us were segregated apart to work on only our little aspects. Ziggy and I had the distinct honor of running the contingency protocols. When China turned the Three Gorges Dam on, the largest dam on Earth, it ended up slowing the planet’s rotation just the slightest bit. Many experts have argued that this was an insignificant side-effect, but the Project Leader was a bleeding heart type who believes in the sanctity of the planet and didn’t want to take any chances. Which meant that Ziggy and I got to dream up the wildest theories and see if they were viable or not.
It was while we were discussing the possibility of time travel that both of us came up with an equation on the back of a napkin in the cafeteria that could theoretically allow for time travel. I argued that time travel was possible but only within one’s lifetime for fear of causing a paradox in which one would never exist. Ziggy disagreed saying that quantum entanglement could occur with the other existing version of one’s self in the timeline which likely meant that one should only travel outside of one’s own lifetime. We weren't exactly sober at the time, but who could be when asked to be the contingency crew and dream up the “what-if” scenarios that our dear Project Leader couldn’t think of.
At some inebriated point, one of us decided it was a good idea to plug our equation into our mock-up Potato and see which outcome would be possible.
With all offices looking the same, we ended up in an office that was hooked directly with the actual device.
It wasn’t until Ziggleman had started running the equation that I noticed a window that looked into the room that held the Potato. There must have been a fault in the containment shield or I was standing in a portion that wasn’t shielded… But at any rate, the last thing I saw was a blinding light and the last thing I heard was Ziggleman calling after me “Beck—”.
In a way, it turns out that both Ziggy and I were both correct about what happens to a person when they travel through time. I found myself as a shade, appearing within a body not my own for an amount of time before jumping around to a different time and person. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to when I appear, only that there seems to be some impossible task that my host is contemplating when I inhabit their body.
You can say I got lucky when Ziggleman was able to make contact with me. Apparently, I still had my smart watch on and he butt dialed me by mistake. I guess through the magic that only Apple is capable of, Ziggy was able to contact me. He still checks in with me from time to time, keeping me updated on any rescue attempt as well as any information I can use to survive whatever predicament I find myself in.
So now I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get back to my own time or if I’ll even have a body to go back to. All I can do is jump from one problem to the next, one day at a time, walking the impossible miles in someone else’s shoes and trying to do some good in whatever my life has become. I’ll keep trying as hard as I can.