photo: jetheriot
I bought a little yam but didn't eat it. It sat in the fruit bowl for weeks as apples, pears and bananas came and went all around it, sprouting, seemingly overnight, purple-green sprout-knobs which grew into bean-like shoots tipped with purple-green leaves. The shoot-leaves, ribbed with miniature veins and pressed together like the tightly closed halves of a Venus flytrap's mouth, opened in slow motion, unfurling, uncrinkling, unwrinkling like soaked skin in reverse. The old yam was alive again.
To shield its tender stalks from the traffic of the fruit bowl, I put it under my sink. Then I forgot all about it. When I looked under the sink for a new battery a month later, there was the yam again! Meanwhile, a forest of pale purple yam-shoots had sprouted from the upper surface of the yam and were tickling the kitchen sink's underbelly they were so tall. I'd locked the little yam in a dungeon with no sunlight and no water, and it had only grown stronger.
I brought it to my father, who I knew would know what to do, who cut it into pieces and planted them in his garden. The shoots made stalks. The stalks made vines. The vines made infinite yams.