I Am What I Yam
A short story about life, death, and vegetables
When was the first time you stepped on or squished a spider—felt its exoskeleton give under your weight—and felt remorse? Maybe it hasn’t come. Or have you snapped off the end of a tree branch and slowly, mindlessly, flayed the skin of bark? How outlandish would I be—the next time you cross a tree or arthropod, or any living organism—to entreat you to contemplate the extent of their lived experience? You’ll find that sonder applies to more than only humans.
* * *
“Daaaad I’m home!” Lily yelled through the front door.
One step into the living room and the musky smell of her father’s philosophy books perforated her generally stuffy nostrils; her cilia filtered the dense existential subject matter. Stacks of hardbacks overflowed the shelves and littered the coffee table. Just like when I left, she thought.
Lily had just returned home from her freshman year of college. She’d eagerly left campus, disenchanted by the formal, sterile approach to scientific study. As a child she’d passionately fulfilled the role of natural philosopher—observing the socialization of ant colonies and creating her own biomes in glass jars—but was disappointed to find her professors’ imagination and wonder for the living world squashed from decades of curriculum standards.
She heard the familiar slam of the mud room screen door. Her father kicked off his dark olive Hunter boots, crossed the kitchen, and hugged her—his little girl.
“Hey sweetie, I’ve missed you. How was the ride?” he asked.
“Sure felt a lot quicker than when I left back in August,” she said. “It was so hazy from harvest; I couldn’t even see the silos from the road. It felt like driving across Mars.”
“Well, we’ve got blue skies today, baby girl.” He hugged her again, even tighter this time.
“I love this time of year,” she said. “You can literally feel the crops coming of age, tirelessly reaching upward. All the way here I watched the rows of crops momentarily line up with my window, before whizzing away behind me.” He watched his daughter smile. “Yeah, it feels good to be home.”
“Why don’t you go start unpacking and clean up a bit,” her father said. “I’ll get a change of clothes myself and start dinner. I think you’ll love this new sweet potato recipe I found.”
Feeling grimy from the hot bus ride, Lily didn’t need another invitation to shower. She bounded upstairs, uplifted by the prospects of the next three months, just the two of them.
* * *
I woke up. It happened suddenly, and far more violently than I would have appreciated. The comfort and support around me splintered, breaking away piece by piece like a puzzle in reverse. A novel phenomenon rushed into the gaps, a sensation indicating omnipresence and necessity, as well as an unsettling sense of burning. I couldn’t shake the feelings of being exposed and vulnerable.
The next emotion I felt was physical pain. It began with a tightness just below my waist, followed by a split-second of weightlessness. Each arm of my rhizome stretched uncomfortably, then snapped with inconceivable pain, as if I had a dozen umbilical cords pulled apart, rather than cut clean. The hurt morphed into a kaleidoscope of numbness, and beams of heavenly white light shone through. The beams, harbingers of hope, swelled until white monopolized the space. Had I been given the choice, I would have been content remaining in the colorless void. Nobody asked me.
As the bright white faded, softer and more tolerable colors introduced themselves. Next thing I knew, I was bobbing up and down, suspended by my stem from Him. I heard a nervous chatter from nearby and looked up to find a cluster of purplish-red siblings, huddled around one tuber considerably larger than the rest. They blocked my view of Him, but I could sense His awesome presence towering above me.
My vision followed His frame downward, where denim meet olive-green boots. A pang of familiarity washed over me. His legs churned like a well-oiled machine, one that would unquestionably persist until the day’s work was complete.
While carried by Him, I experienced cold and wind. Shocked by the merciless sting against my back, I whipped my head around to confront my abuser, but froze, stunned to learn it was invisible, yet somehow ubiquitous. Had I known of my northwestern relatives, the Russets and their thicker skin, I would have discerned jealousy, too.
I left behind the inexplicable nature of my adversary. As soon as I’d done so, my focus turned to the vast field of rows and holes, stretching on endlessly. One of these had been mine—my entire life. How short, almost non-existent, that life felt. A deep, cosmic chuckle escaped me, amused by how quickly a sense of boundlessness had turned to insignificance.
The scene of holes repeated like some sort of artificial backdrop overlaid on a conveyor belt. Patterns of rows and holes and cloud formations seemed to duplicate themselves ad infinitum. I began to wonder if I wasn’t being duped by my own version of The Truman Show. But the relationship between insignificance and beauty has its own sense of humor. Having been accustomed to limitless shades of brown, the verdant fields, capped by a gentle blue and cushiony whites, warmed something within me—that fickle, ineffable state of joy.
A small dark dot appeared on the horizon, enlarging in sync with the now-accustomed bobbing motion. The dot became a blob, and then a rectangle, continually morphing until it was clearly a small processing plant.
He came to a halt by a door to the building. Portentous shrieks and moans intermittently escaped the grip of a low, reliable drone. Information from our shared leaves and main stem dispersed through each of our stolons and proximal ends, telling us He was relaxed, indifferent to the scene. Either this wasn’t His first time hearing the noises or, like a dog whistle to humans, He simply couldn’t detect the gut-wrenching cries for mercy.
He swung open the door and the source of the wailing made me want to vomit, had I the gastrointestinal workings. Instead, starch seeped from my pores like an existential exfoliation.
Something about the funneling, skinning, slicing, and frying taking place before me wasn’t new to my consciousness, as if former rhizomal connections had diffused this information to me, becoming instinctual. Yes, I’ve been here before. But experiential knowledge trumps theoretical. In a macabre realization, I wanted to know what this penultimate experience was all about.
We were dumped in a bin and taken to a real conveyor belt, complete with two walls and cleats to stop us from falling. Up, up, up we went, toward the ceiling and higher still. Over the wall I could see the crisscrossed knife blades that awaited. If man had to fall, why not us too?
In those final moments my thoughts met Soren, Friedrich, and Jean-Paul—even Fyodor and Franz were there. I thought, What a strange place for dad’s friends to appear? Franz looked at me and shrugged. Would you have rather been a beetle? he asked.
My mind flickered back to the fleeting, unparalleled sense of pleasure I’d squeezed from the ripe, blue sky. Or had it squeezed something from me? So indelibly real, it now seemed like a false memory. Would I have known to recognize joy, had it not been for the previous agony, pain, cold, stinging, and insignificance?
Looking down from the precipice, I asked myself, Must I embody the same emotions as those shrieks before me? What if the mindset with which one approaches the end dictates the nature of the event? Why should I fear the plainly inevitable? Would not courage, or, if bold enough, optimism, be more suitable?
And so, adopting optimism as my doctrine, I dropped from the edge. I entered a swirling mist of acceptance and ecstasy, and observed the dissolution of a part of Me that had long fought to be its own separate thing. But whether it’s death that gives meaning to life or life that gives to death, I still don’t know, for I’ve yet to find any end which would reveal the answer.