The Adam West Conspiracy

The potato arrived in the mail, lumpy and bruise-colored, as if it remembered pain. No note, just a postmark from a town I’d buried a decade ago. Mom would’ve called it an omen. Mom believed in omens—tea leaves, bird patterns, the way the neighbor’s tabby stared at our porch like it owed him money.

I placed it on the windowsill. Radiation made my hands tremble, so I’d stopped cooking. But this? A dare.

Kevin, who never believed in endings, once mailed me a Ziploc of dandelion seeds when I got the diagnosis. “Plant these,” he’d written. “They’re assholes. They’ll outlive us all.” I never did. The seeds sat in a drawer, next to his last birthday card—Wisdom does not become you scrawled in his jagged hand, our old inside joke about his hatred of platitudes.

By morning, the potato had changed. Not roots, but tendrils, thin and iridescent, creeping down the sill like black liquid oil. When I touched one, it curled around my finger, warm. The scar on my chest—a jagged souvenir from surgery—itched.

By week’s end, it owned the kitchen. Vines pulsed faintly, breathing in time with the hum of the refrigerator. I stopped answering the phone. Nurses left voicemails; the vines drank those too.

Last night, I dreamt of Kevin. Not the gaunt version from the hospice, but the boy who’d stolen a tractor joyride at 16, who’d convinced me purple was just blue grieving red. He stood beneath the blooming mass, its shadow curling like smoke, holding a crayon—periwinkle, the label said.

“You were right,” he said. “It is a bullshit color.”

The vines tightened around my ribs. Not suffocating. A hug.

This morning, velvet-dark flowers unfurled, their petals deep as bruises, exhaling a scent that made me think of Mom’s perfume, Kevin’s cigarettes, the salt of a childhood lake. I ate one. It tasted like a summer that never ended.

The scar still itches. But the tendrils hum now—low, melodic, like they know my name.