- Convergent Stories
- Posts
- My Husband, the Sweet Potato
My Husband, the Sweet Potato
Short fiction

On his forty-fifth day in bed, my husband opened his eyes, looked at me, and calmly remarked “Eve, why don’t we return to the dirt from which we came?”
Honestly, I was happy enough that he had spoken at all, so much so that his words seemed of secondary importance in the moment. He hadn’t spoken for two weeks. His prior words, when I got up for my last work day before my job’s strike action began in earnest, had been “Knock ‘em dead, sugar cakes.” See? He wasn’t a lump. The man cared, in his own way.
Before that, his utterances were more of what anyone would expect from a dude living through the manufactured indignities of end-stage capitalism: vague grievances against whichever vulnerable minority the podcasts had told him was at fault for his own failures, a mild distrust of fluoridation, and reminding me that we were almost out of toilet paper.
I don’t mean to insult him, or to diminish his struggles, just to tell the truth. The truth is that I love him. He always cared, after all. He wanted me to be comfortable and happy. Once upon a time, he even wanted me.
His question about returning to the dirt was the most introspection I had ever heard from him. It brought a strange flush to my cheeks, the way that my husband—a lump of unexamined stimuli, product of everything that he was told was Man—expressed a thought that was uniquely his own. If it took him forty-five days of stillness for a new idea to percolate and express itself, then that’s how long it took. I was proud of him. In that day, my husband became his own person.
He also began to grow a vine.
It emerged from his hair, little tendrils that sought the company of their partners and wound themselves together, emitting the faint scent of the jungle. I supposed I should have called an expert, but the scent excited me. It was deep, ancestral, earthy. And of course, he seemed so peaceful.
His skin began to roughen. It felt like home against the palm of my hand, like comfort. The distinguishing limbs and protuberances that formed the shape of his body sank into each other, a slow regression that would have worried me, but for the faint smile on his lips. The vine grew, an inch a day, then two, questing towards the light of the bedroom windows. When it pressed up against the glass, I could sense its quest for sunlight, and for dirt, and cracked the window. He breathed a sigh of utter pleasure and was silent thereafter.
By the time the vine found the dirt, my husband was a sweet potato. The traditional, botanical classification, mind you, not a yam. Wikipedia was clear about the difference and I trusted it, even though I didn’t bother to check the citations. It was enough that they were there.
The strike ended eventually. We didn’t get what we wanted, but it was enough to scrape by on a single income. I sleep in the guest room now. Our bedroom is where the sweet potato lives, connected by its vine to the earth and the rhythms of the seasons. I’ve never been happier and, I think, neither has he.