The Collection

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.'

Jan and I put the front legs of our chairs back down on the wooden floor and moved over to the screen. I could smell my grandpa's medication as I stood next to him—a sickeningly acrid odor of Vicks, vitamin Bl, and rubbing al­cohol. He looked suddenly small, shrunken somehow, as though he had withered over the years, and I could see his scalp through the wispy strands of hair he combed back over his head. He was going to die, I suddenly realized. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for all time.

I was going to miss him.

He touched my shoulder lightly with his right hand while his left pointed across the meadow. 'It's over there,' he said. 'You see the barn?'

I followed his finger. A large, square, dilapidated struc­ture of rotting, unpainted boards arose from the tall grasses beyond the chicken coops. I remembered playing there as a kid, when it was all new and freshly painted; playing hide-and-go-seek with my brother and my cousins, hiding in the secret loft behind the hay-baler, endless summer afternoons of sweaty searching. This was not the barn I once knew. I nodded, smiling, though I didn't feel happy.

His finger moved across the horizon, passing from the barn to a small cluster of shacks on the hillside to the west. 'See those buildings there to the right of the barn?' Again I nodded. 'On the hill?' I continued nodding. 'That's it.'

Jan was squinting against the afternoon sun, her hand perched above her eyes like a makeshift visor. 'Which one is it? I see a couple buildings there.'

My grandpa was already starting back across the floor. 'It doesn't matter,' he said. 'Just stay away from the whole area.' He sat down once again in his chair at the foot of the kitchen table. A sharp flash of pain registered on his face as he bent his gimp leg to sit down.

We, too, returned to our chairs. And we talked away the rest of the afternoon

.

Jan awoke screaming. She sat bolt upright in bed, the acne cream on her face and her sleep-spiked hair giving her the appearance of a shrieking harpy. I hugged her close, pulling her to my chest and murmuring reassurances. 'It's okay,' I said softly, stroking her hair. 'It's all right.'

She stopped crying after a few minutes and sat up, facing me. She tried to smile. 'That was some nightmare.'

I smiled back. 'So I gathered. Tell me about it.'

'It was about the bathhouse,' she said, pulling the covers up around her chin and snuggling closer. 'And I don't want you to take this wrong, but your grandfather was in it.' Her eyes looked out the bedroom window as she spoke, and she gazed into the darkness toward the group of buildings on the hillside. 'I was just sleeping here, in this bed, with you, when I woke up. I heard some kind of noise, and I looked on the floor, and there was your