CW: mentions of confinement
Iris’ row of potatoes is neat and ordered. Perfectly planted to have the correct amount of space to stretch and grow. She’s read the musty, torn magazine twenty times to learn how to grow them correctly. The ink still stains her fingers. When she digs them from the ground, she cradles them in her arms and looks across the secluded yard, through the dense trees and imagines home. Her mom, her sister, her dog. It must only be three or four miles. She’d counted in her head how long it took the car to stop.
She puts the potatoes in the pillowcase and drags them to the cellar to rest under the dingy window where the butchering August heat knifes through them. The electronic band on her ankle flashes red as the second pillowcase thumps hard against each step. She has the full crop in the cellar by the time Eugene returns home.
“Got the crop in, I see,” he says from the bedroom doorway. “Glad you’re finally getting used to life here.”
“I like growing things.” And follows his eyes from her to the barred window above her bed.
The magazine warns it only takes a week for solanine to build up in the flesh of potatoes when exposed to light, that a cellar will fill with poisonous suffocating gas if they are not properly stored. She will tell Eugene they are too heavy for her to bring up, that when she planted them, she was thinking of him.
Rachel Ashcraft is a librarian in the rural midwest of the US. She has short stories published in Plott Hound, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Grendel Press’ More Than a Monster Anthology, Apex’s Strange Locations and elsewhere.
What a delicious, original murder method. Death by potato gas! Awesome.
Fantastic! I want to know more about Iris. Actually, I want to know Iris!