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Sweet Potato Pie [MultiFormat]
eBook by Lawrence M. Schoen
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eBook Category: Fantasy
eBook Description: Young Zachary doesn't know why his uncle has a beautiful new wife every year, for as long as he can remember, but he knows his uncle likes pie, and so does he. When it rains sweet potatoes--as it sometimes does--Zak gathers up a bunch and sets off to make a pie for the family's dinner.
eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, 2005
Fictionwise Release Date: May 2006
Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [145 KB], eReader (PDB) [22 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [8 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [8 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [71 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [78 KB], hiebook (KML) [77 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [34 KB], iSilo (PDB) [7 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [9 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [36 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [15 KB]
Words: 2786
Reading time: 7-11 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
 
"Lawrence M. Schoen's 'Sweet Potato Pie' laughs at labels and caused me to reread several early sentences, just to make sure that psychedelic drugs weren't at work (on me, I'm sure Schoen's mind is in an alternate state of reality). 'Yams is what you use to make lava mind its manners when ol' Chowder Top starts spewing that molten rock and ash and poison gas, but sweet potatoes will grow you up a mess of zombies when you plant them just right in the sand.' Now that's a sentence that demands attention. Here's a rural, fantasy, horror, maybe science fiction, cooking story. As chances are you've never read one of those, you should grab this one as quick as you can. It starts with Zachary gathering up some of the sweet potatoes that rained down from the sky, as they are like to do, in order to make a pie. Yes, he wants a pie, not a mess of zombies and ... Perhaps I should stop right there. This is a tale that defies summarizing. It's weird and wonderful and will dig into you more with its strangeness than with its deep meaning, but as most stories don't get ahold at all, that's just fine."--Matthew M. Foster, Tangent Online
Sweet potatoes fell from the sky last night, plopping all over the porch and bouncing two or three times in those craziest looping bounces that make you think of jumping beans before they lost all their inertia and just settled down. Some folks thought they was yams, and that's not surprising, but I can usually tell the difference. Yams is what you use to make lava mind its manners when ol' Chowder Top starts spewing that molten rock and ash and poison gas, but sweet potatoes will grow you up a mess of zombies when you plant them just right in the sand. Some folks think it's all about how deep you plant 'em, and that's true as far as it goes, but my Pa taught me the real secret, back before he passed. What's most important is the angle you plant 'em at, and how far apart you put 'em from each other. If you put 'em too close, they don't yearn like they could, and you won't get but two or three zombies out of each potato. If you put 'em too far, they get all stand-offish, and you're lucky if you even get one zombie from every two potatoes. Sweet potatoes is finicky stuff, but my uncle Marco says I got the knack for it. The thing was, Ma didn't need no more zombies for working the fields just now, so I scooped up the sweet potatoes from the porch and carried them inside to scrub 'em clean and cook 'em instead.
"Zachary, what you got there, boy? Yams?"
"No ma'am," I says to Aunt Phoebe, who was sitting in the parlor knitting something fierce. "Sweet potatoes." Aunt Phoebe ain't what you call a blood aunt; she's my aunt by marriage, having wed Uncle Marco last year just a month before my eighth birthday, right after the county fair. She was his tenth wife, but he didn't tell her that and it ain't the place of no one else to bring it up if he don't. I liked the one before better, Aunt Jenny. She could do that origami thing and used to take pages out of last year's catalog and fold me up these tiny dragons that could fly and breathe fire. Not that Aunt Phoebe is bad or nothing, she don't know paper folding, but she's real pretty to look at and Uncle Marco always gets the best price for our crops when Ma sends him and Phoebe into town to bargain.
"Ain't no call to be bringing yams in here, young man," says Aunt Phoebe. "The town hall corked Chowder Top last week and the seal is guaranteed to last ten years. Won't be no lava flows anywhere near this farm until you're all growed up."
"Yes, ma'am," I says, real polite like because last week Uncle Marco told me that Aunt Phoebe's not been all there all the time lately. "But these ain't yams. These is sweet potatoes." I guess this is one of them times because Aunt Phoebe don't seem like she heard me, or if she did she didn't care, or something.
"And you can't cook those yams up, neither," she says. "I'm deathly allergic to yams, or did you forget?"
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