There are these creatures that live under my porch, and up until yesterday, they were quite friendly with me.
When I first noticed them, I thought that someone had dropped a sack of potatoes near the walkway to the front door. They were each about the size of a potato, with brown mottled skin, not unlike the textrue of a potato. They had very small eyes that were entirely pupil sunk into their noseless faces. Each had a pair of twig-like legs and arms, and some of them carried twigs sharpened into potato-people-sized spears. They seemed altogether shocked when I happened upon them.
I had come home early from work for a reason that now seems wholly insignificant, and found several of these creatures hopping out from under my porch and making strange gesticulations toward the mums in the planter with their spears. They were apparently involved in quite a heated argument, otherwise they might have noticed me pull into the driveway and scattered, leaving me none the wiser.
One of the group was grunting very loudly (for a potato) at the others, which I’ve come to learn, but not understand, is their primary means of communication. He was pointing his spear at one of the others, who had some yellow mum petals protruding from his mouth.
I must have looked as astonished as they did when they finally did notice me. I’m sure I stood on the walkway, staring in incredulity at the groundlings, just as they stared back at me. One of them even dropped his spear at the sight of me.
They didn’t make an attempt to run. They weren’t afraid, even though it seems that they had taken great effort not to be seen up until then. They calmly gathered their things and dragged the fat little potato who was eating our mums down through a hole under our porch that I hadn’t noticed before.
I went in the back door.
I didn’t know at first whether I should tell anyoe about them. I wasn’t really sure that it had happened. And besides that, telling people that you’ve seen things like this is the kind of thing that gets you taken off of calling lists for holiday parties, especially if you can’t offer proof. I wasn’t interested in bothering them so long as they went back to not bothering me. Oh, well.
I guess at some point they figured that if I had seen them once and didn’t do anything about it, then it wouldn’t be of great harm if they showed themselves again. I was happy to have not had any additional hallucinations for two weeks when I pulled into my driveway after work one evening to find a pair of groundlings carrying something across the macadam.
It looked like the roots of a plant. They ran quickly across the pavement, leaving only slight crumbs of dirt from the roots as they ran. I thought I saw the rear carrier wave his little stick arm at me as they passed by, dashing under the porch into their burrow.
I tried to broach the subject with my wife. She’s usually sympathetic to what she calls my “endearing idiosyncracies”, but she simply wasn’t buying the whole “potato men” thing. I showed her the dead plant on the side of the house, where they had obviously dug up the roots, but she said it must have been a neighbor’s dog. I showed her the hole where they went under the porch. She had a close look, but didn’t see anything moving or anything that looked like a potato man. Maybe I has seen a dirty squirrel or a groundhog or something, she suggested.
Needless to say, I haven’t slept very well since then. When I do sleep, I have vivid dreams of my kids playing with these little potato-shaped men – taking turns pushing them on swings, and turning little jumpropes. Sometimes, in these dreams, I’m in a frying pan, and I’m looking up at a human-sized potato man who is cooking me.
I’ve seen them a few times since I tried to reveal their existance to my wife. They’re always doing something around the yard. Not exactly destructive, but never constructive. They seem to eat plants here and there, and they take the roots of things when they’re dead or near death, which apparently happens a lot in our oddly alkaline soil. Who knows, maybe they’re causing that?
For all I know, there could be a huge city of these creatures under my house. My house could be one of many portals from the underground potato person world onto the surface for when they stage their mass invasion!
Finally yesterday, I couldn’t take it any more. Yes, they had left me well enough alone after I had discovered them, but they could have taken more pains to let me completely forget about them. This time I saw about twenty of them drag a small log into their burrow, and the straw broke that camel.
After dinner when it got a little dark, I hunted down my shovel. Feeling safe since I had never seen them out of their hole after dark, I started to fill the hole under the porch with dirt from my front yard. My neighbors might think me crazy, but they’d think me even more crazy if my sleeplessness left me rambling nonsensically about these little veggie folks living under my porch.
And so with the hole packed with fresh dirt and my lawn in need of patching, I dusted off my hands and headed inside.
My peaceful dreams of flying in jets with supermodels were interrupted by some strange noise in the bedroom. I woke up to find a pair of sinister-looking potato men on the bed near my wife’s head. One of them held a pair of our scissors, which he had somehow managed to get out of the kitchen drawer. The other gripped the lock of hair that he casually snipped off, seeing that I was awake.
Aghast, I didn’t react quickly enough to shoo them away before they both hopped off the bed and disappeared. Their message had been sent.
This morning, the hole was dug out again, and the yard was still mangled from my digging of last night. I don’t know what intentions they mean, but I know that I don’t stand a chance against them if they really wanted to cause me harm. As for today, I’m going to leave them alone, and probably call a real estate agent. Hopefully our next house just has termites.
