Couch potato

His ex-wife, Denise, took everything including most of the cookware. Except for one sheet pan which is how this all started.

Marcus started with a single baked potato every evening. No butter, no sour cream or salt. He appreciated the ritual of consistency in a life that had become unmoored after the divorce.

"Potatoes are perfect divorce food," he told his sister when she visited that first month. "Filling, cheap and you can't mess them up."

She'd laughed, but he'd been serious. In a world where his wife had left, his job had downsized him into a basement cubicle, and his own reflection had become a stranger, the potato was reliable. Honest. A potato never pretended to be something it wasn't.

Unlike Denise.

One potato became two. Then three. Then hash browns for breakfast because why not? Potato soup. Twice baked. Scalloped. Au gratin on Sundays like a reward for making it through another week without killing himself.

His sister stopped calling after he canceled Thanksgiving. "I'm making my own thing," he'd said. "Loaded potato casserole. You should try it."

She'd tried one more time in December, showing up unannounced with takeout Chinese. Marcus had answered the door in sweatpants, his face fuller than she remembered, his eyes oddly flat.

"You look pale," she'd said.

"I'm fine. Just tired." He hadn't invited her in. Behind him, she could see stacks of potato sacks leaning against the wall like sandbags. Cool and loamy, with a hint of moist rot that seemed alive.

"Marcus, this isn't healthy. You need to see someone. Talk to someone."

"I talk to myself," he'd said, and smiled in a way that made her skin crawl. "I'm very good company."

That was the last time she saw him vertical.

By January, he'd discovered online forums dedicated to potato cultivation and preparation. He spent hours reading about heirloom varieties, soil composition, the perfect conditions for storage. He spent what little money he had saved on specialty potatoes from Idaho, from Peru, from small farms in Scotland that grew ancient varietals with names like Mayan Gold and Purple Majesty.

He documented everything in a leather journal: dates, preparation methods, taste profiles. The entries grew increasingly strange.

January 14th: Fingerlings at breakfast. Feel more articulated. More precise.

January 22nd: Russets all day. Strength building. Density increasing. No longer need jacket in apartment. Self-sufficient heat generation?

February 3rd: Purple Peruvian. Dreams of soil. Dark, cool earth. The waiting. The dormancy before spring. It calls to me.

His coworkers noticed the changes before Marcus did. The way his movements became slower, more deliberate, like he was calculating the weight of each gesture. How his desk chair groaned under his increasing mass. The skin on his hands took on a waxy quality that made handshakes uncomfortable because his palm felt both clammy and powdery.

"You feeling okay?" his cubicle mate asked one afternoon.

Marcus had looked at him for a long moment, his eyes unfocused, as if seeing through him. "Better than okay," he'd finally said.

Three days later, he stopped coming to work entirely.

By February, his skin had taken on a peculiar texture, dense and rough. The colour changing to matte. He went to his doctor who suggested blood tests and a dermatologist, but Marcus ignored this asinine advice. They'd talk about "lifestyle changes" and "balanced nutrition," which always felt like accusations.

The starch accumulated in layers he couldn't see. In his cells. In the spaces between thoughts where anxiety used to live. He felt calmer now. Heavier and more substantial.

One morning, he woke to find his left hand had hardened into something pale and oblong. He flexed his fingers and they barely moved, the skin crackling like a russet's thick hide. When he pressed his thumb against his palm, he left a small dent that didn't spring back.

Marcus stared at it for a long time. Then he went to the kitchen and made home fries. He burned the first batch and started to weep, the sound startling even him.

"It's fine," he said aloud to the empty apartment. "This is fine."

By evening, his forearm had followed. The transformation crept up past his elbow like a starchy tide, replacing flesh with something firmer, something that didn't bruise or ache or feel much of anything at all.

He should have been terrified.

Instead, he felt relieved.

His sister broke down the door a week later after his boss reported him missing. She found him in the kitchen, mostly immobile, his body a lumpy mass of potato flesh sprouting eyes where his joints used to be. The whole apartment smelled like earth and mold. Like vegetables left too long in a dark pantry.

She stood in the doorway, frozen. The thing that had once been Marcus took up most of the kitchen. His human form was barely distinguishable. Suggestions of shoulders, the curve of what might have once been a spine, all subsumed into the grotesque vegetable bulk. The skin was mottled brown and tan, with patches of purple where he must have eaten those Peruvian varieties. One eye, a real human eye, remained in what approximated his face, blinking slowly, wetly, surrounded by the shallow divots of potato eyes pushing through from beneath.

The kitchen table had collapsed under his weight. Potato peels carpeted the floor, brown and curling. Dozens of empty sacks were strewn everywhere. On the counter, a half-peeled potato sat next to a knife, as if he'd been preparing one more meal before the transformation completed itself.

"Marcus?" Her voice cracked. "Oh my God, Marcus, what did you do?"

The human eye swiveled toward her. She saw recognition in it, and worse, she saw satisfaction. Like he'd finally achieved something he'd been working toward all along.

His body shifted slightly, and she heard the sound of skin creaking, of dense starch compressing and settling. From somewhere in the mass, a sound emerged. Like air pushed through organic matter, wet and whispering.

"Perrrrfect," it gurgled.

She saw his journal on the floor, picked it up. The last entry was dated yesterday, the handwriting nearly illegible, letters thick and clumsy as if written with a fist instead of fingers.

Can't hold pen much longer. Makes sense now. Potato knows. Potato always known. Spend our lives becoming something we're not, Aways pretending. Potato simply is. I almost there. Almost free.

He tried to answer but his mouth had sealed over, skin tightening into the smooth surface of a Yukon Gold. His thoughts moved slowly now, thick as gravy. He wanted to tell her that he wasn't scared anymore. That the world couldn't hurt something this solid, this simple, this... complete.

But all that emerged was a soft hiss of steam from somewhere near what she imagined used to be his neck.

His sister backed away, phone trembling in her hand. Behind her, through the kitchen window, he could see the apartment complex, the parking lot, the world continuing on without him. People going to jobs they hated. People pretending to be whole.

Marcus felt himself settling deeper into his new form. His thoughts were thinning out, spreading through the starchy mass of his body like butter melting into a baked potato. Soon there would be nothing left but the quiet, the stillness, the perfect safety of not having to be human anymore.

His last coherent thought, before the final transformation: I'll never be lonely again.

The potato doesn't want company.

By the time the paramedics arrived, there was nothing they could do. What remained of Marcus McCallister sat slumped in his kitchen chair, a 200-pound russet potato with thinning hair sprouting from the top like some nightmare version of a vegetable garden. The eyes, seven of them now, were growing in random places across the surface, small dark dimples that almost looked like they were watching.

They called it a medical mystery. Documented it. Studied tissue samples that came back as 97% pure Solanum tuberosum.

His sister had him cremated. She needed a letter from the health department to prove he had once been human. In the end, the funeral home charged extra for "unusual biological remains."

She kept the ashes in a simple wooden box, but she never scattered them like she'd planned. Sometimes late at night, she swore she could smell potatoes baking. One morning she noticed something green poking out of the urn.

She brushed the soil away from the urn’s rim and froze in horror. A single pale sprout had broken through the ashes

Reaching, alive and hungry.