Member-only story
Ancient Pyramid
And the fine art of bagging potatoes
Stanley has just enough strength to pick up the potatoes.
He dumps one burlap bag after another into a large bin,
each Idaho with a different character and shape.
The machine churns and catches a potato or two.
They fall onto a rattling conveyor belt
in the quiet darkness of the warehouse floor.
Stanley takes three swigs from the whiskey bottle.
One for his father, another for his mother,
and the last swig for a future that might never come.
The potatoes slowly move to their destination,
dropping into five-pound plastic bags,
weighed on a chain-link scale,
tied and stacked onto a pallet like an ancient pyramid.
After years of bagging potatoes and drinking whiskey,
Stanley’s life comes to a grinding halt
as the motor of the bagging machine breaks down.
He drops like a sack to the dirty warehouse floor,
squarely on top of the wooden pallet.
He swells like a rough, knotty potato
and lays there like a bagged Idaho.
