Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
There once was a man who was not very academically bright. Not stupid, mind you, but quite resistant to the education system and the learning methods applied there. It was a perennial source of embarrassment to his parents, especially his mother. His parents were both doctors, highly respected by their peers and liked by society. His two brothers and sister had followed in their footsteps, finally establishing practices abroad which scattered them to all four corners of the globe.
Walter had no such ambition. Fame, fortune and notoriety – he had little desire for any of it. He was perfectly content to waddle through life. Take it as it comes.
Throughout adulthood, he drifted from job to job, had middling success without stretching himself, found a career he didn’t despise and lived a modest life. He married, became a father of a boy, Walter Jr., and on the home stretch to retirement from his tolerable job as an accountant, his life took a dramatic turn.
“What are we looking for again?”
Walter Jr. was kneeling over cardboard boxes laden with books and magazines. Their dusty covers made him cough suddenly. No response forthcoming, he turned around and saw his father with a flashlight in the opposite end of the attic, hooking through rolled up posters with his hand, before grabbing an old fire poker to prod them out of the way.
“Dad?”
“Just a minute, son.”
The older man, who had always sported a little pot belly, reached down and pulled out, with some effort, the object of his attention.
“Mind yourself,” his son said, getting up and in a walking crouch so as not to hit his head on the overhead beams, reached the man. “What is it?”
“The only device you’ll ever need for Uni.” He held it up, and rubbed a hand along its surface, removing a layer of thick dust. “No? Kids.”
“No idea.”
“We used these back in the day. It’s an air fryer.”
A look of resignation on his son’s face. “What’s it do?”
“Well,” Senior said, motioning his son to the attic opening. “Mind yourself on that ladder. I’ll hand it down.”
The younger man descended the staircase and when he had reached the landing, raised a hand for the object. His father lowered it carefully through the opening.
“It’s…for cooking stuff. Roast potatoes. That’s what I cooked. But you could do veg, fish, meat. You name it. This was the way to cook things in a hurry back in the day. Cheap and cheerful.”
The young man took the device on the second attempt, and as it passed to his hands, there was the sound of something rattling inside.
“Dad, I’m pretty sure cooking devices have improved in the last thirty years. I don’t need any antiques.”
“You’d be surprised,” Senior countered, finally reaching the ground floor. “Sometimes the best ones are the older methods. Let me have a look.”
Walter Sr. pulled open the lid of the air fryer and was immediately greeted by a squeal. From inside.
“What the hell was that?”
“I…don’t know,” Senior replied. He shook it lightly in his hand and heard the thing inside react violently.
“When was the last time you used that thing?”
“I…uh…when I was your age. Back in University.”
“Thought you dropped out?”
“I did. I mean, before I dropped out. Let me have a look at it down in my workshop.”
Workshop implied tools. Walter senior deplored manual labour, but he liked the ring of calling it a workshop. There, he enjoyed spending time building his wrestling figurine set from the 80s and 90s featuring Hulk Hogan, the Ultimate Warrior, Macho Man Randy Savage and a motley crew of other superstars in wrestling’s golden era. It was also where he had grand plans for starting a new hobby. Model train sets. But that would need to wait.
He closed the door and placed the air fryer on the countertop. The device had long ago lost its black paint coating. With a cloth, he wiped away the remaining dust layer. Plugging it into the mains, there was no response from the machine. He tapped the side of it, and this provoked further outrage from the resident within.
“Bloody mouse,” Walter cursed.
He slipped a plastic bag over the shelf compartment, and slowly slid it from the body of the air fryer. As the gap widened, he peered into the darkness inside, anticipating motion and ready to pull the bag up and trap the drawer contents.
Two gleaming emerald eyes peered up at him. He gently closed the drawer again, relieved to hear it click shut.
Walter decided to take it to a friend who was a Science Teacher at the local school. Mr. Browne was surprised to see an old school friend, and even more surprised when he learned the reason for the visit.
“And it’s not a mouse? Rat?”
“With green eyes?”
Mr. Browne shrugged. “OK,” he said. “Bring it over here.”
Walter carried the box carefully to the table and slipped it into a perspex tank container. A thick plastic glove was affixed to the side. Browne slipped his arm through, emerging on the other side with a gloved hand.
“Careful, I think it’s angry.” Walter said.
“So would you be if you were stuck inside a box for thirty years.”
As the teacher drew open the container an inch, there was silence. The men looked at each other before Walter nodded for him to continue. Browne slowly pulled the drawer out further, the light of the lab slowly dawning on the nocturnal chamber of the air fryer.
“Do you see anything? I can’t see…”
As the drawer shelf slipped from the container, there was a rapid blur of movement. From the darkened corner, a round mass shot forward, causing the teacher to drop the drawer on its side.
“Jesus Christ!”
The thing fell to the floor half-obscured by the drawer. Sitting. Motionless. It had a waxy yellow coat, with what looked like veins or tubers pulsing along its surface. After a few seconds, sensing danger had passed, it rolled in a languid manner before finally settling in front of the gaping men. Two small apertures on the mass blinked, and eyes the colour of green gems glinted open in the light.
“What the hell is that? It looks like a—” Walter said.
“Some kind of…”
“It looks like a…”
“Like a…”
“Potato,” the men said at the same time. “With eyes.”
The men looked at each other, and then back at the creature.
The school was placed in quarantine while the foreign creature was tested and removed to a high-grade biological facility for further experimentation. The discovery and coverage of the event dominated local news and made national headlines. Three years later – the year that he finally retired from his accounting job – Walter received a phone call from a lab in the city.
The scientists, biologists and zoologists had concluded that the conditions that he had created in his air fryer – namely his culinary choices as a student, the environmental factors present in his attic, the slow decay associated with the mould of the device, and not least the fact that he hadn’t washed his air fryer in decades, had in some way contributed to the perfect storm – a set of circumstances where life was created.
Walter laughed nervously down the phone. “Just don’t call me God.”
Six months later, the findings were published in the journal Nature. The new species was named Solanum Walteri with a not too subtle nod to its discoverer.
One year later, playing with his model train set, his wife dropped a letter in his lap. It was from the same University he had flunked out of college. He opened it and skimmed the contents until reaching an emboldened passage.
We would cordially like to bestow upon you an Honorary Degree to recognise your achievements in the field of Advanced Zoology.
As the locomotive train looped around him, Walter reached out and rang the silver bell on top of the coal carriage.
Tring tring.
“Better late than never, Ma.”
This story was written for the ambitious creative project, ‘The Weekly Kook’, where I release a brand new short story every week for a year, totalling…yep, you guessed it – 52 stories.
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