Prose Potato

It began not with touch, but with tremor. The soil had always carried its endless murmurs—worms wriggling through the dark, the slow stretch of roots reaching deeper, the drip of water finding hollows in stone. These were the background notes of existence, the constant undercurrent of being alive beneath the surface. But this tremor was […]

Recognition was not immediate. It was not loud. It arrived the way moss finds stone: slowly, intimately, without certainty. But when it arrived, the potato knew. For a time, there had only been the memory of a presence. A warmth once shared. A pulse once echoed. But now, that echo returned—not as repetition, but as

Anticipation was not born in the mind, but in the pulse. It began the way a breeze begins underground—not by wind, but by a subtle rearrangement of warmth and scent. A nudge. A signal. The potato did not know what had shifted, but it felt it. Like a hush before words. Like a question before

Longing was not a sharp thing. It was soft—soft like the soundless pressure of water against stone, like the silence between raindrops falling underground. The potato did not know what it longed for at first. There was no shape to the ache, no name—only a pull. A pull toward more. This was not curiosity; that

Joy did not enter with a trumpet. It came as the return of breath after a long, silent terror. The potato, having emerged from its confrontation with fear, did not seek happiness. It merely sought presence. And in that quiet presence, joy arrived. The soil had not changed. The vibrations above still came and went.

Fear, when it first came, did not arrive as a jolt. It slid in, like fog beneath a door—quiet, uninvited, and absolute. The potato felt it not as a reaction to danger, but as the awareness that danger could exist. It was not fear of something—but the possibility of anything. It began with decay. Not

In the stillness of the soil, questions were not voiced, yet they echoed. The potato, in its rooted silence, began noticing changes it had never truly acknowledged. Every shift in moisture, every tremor in the ground above, every microscopic shift in temperature—these once-ignored phenomena now shimmered with a new significance. They were data. No longer

There was no beginning—only the continuation of a stillness so old it had forgotten how to end. The soil was dense and quiet, its darkness uninterrupted. It did not press or cradle—it enfolded, indifferent to what lay inside it. Time did not move here. Time did not exist. There were no clocks buried beneath roots.