the war of the potatoes: a story

One morning I was watching a cloud that looked like a tiny potato. Then it got bigger. Then a potato hit me in the face.

Two days later a piece of broccoli fell on my head. The following week I was struck by a carrot.

Over the next few months I was hit by turnips, Brussels sprouts, onions, leeks, cabbages and parsnips. These events were irregular and unpredictable. When I was out of doors I spent a lot of time looking up at the sky. As a result I walked into many objects and persons, including a very young child whose leg I broke, and I was knocked down by several cyclists. I also fatally injured a tiny dog which I stepped on after dislodging it from a spectacularly thin woman's handbag, and caused a bus to swerve into the garden of a pub. Eventually I took to wearing a bowler hat.

Not once was I assailed by a tomato. This made me suspect I was not the victim of freakish natural occurrences, such as the rains of frogs or fish one sometimes hears about, but of an intelligent agency, aware that a tomato is classed as a fruit and not a vegetable.

After considerable thought I set about tracing a boy I had bullied at school. I was the ringleader of a gang who forced him to eat vegetables after he had refused them at lunch on his first day at the school, citing his parents' peculiar religious beliefs. Thereafter we tormented him continually. He was a scholarly lad who excelled at science, and now, after some diligent research, I discovered that in later life he had become an engineer, specialising in ballistics. My suspicions were confirmed.

I found out where he lived and went to confront him. The door to his house was opened by a tearful woman who informed me that he had died the previous day when a mysterious contraption of his own invention exploded. I questioned her about this device, but she told me she had never been permitted to see it. She pointed to the remains of a garden shed that had been violently demolished, and told me that what could be found of her husband's body had been removed in a small plastic bag. I offered my condolences and left, noting that the garden was spattered with traces of what looked like coleslaw, with a pinkish tinge. As I walked back to the station I reflected on the workings of fate, cautiously removing my bowler hat for increasingly long periods of time, and with an ever lighter heart.

Since then I have not been troubled by falling vegetables.

Make of this what you will, but when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.