The Death Of A Potato Chip

There was once a chip who lived in the shadow of a mountain. He was a wild potato chip who dreamed of being a tortilla but he was culturally uneducated and ashamed of his peasant ways. The potato chips parents had been made by hand, and so had his forefathers for generations, boiled in potato oil from their dead parents before them.

This potato chip had resisted the potato propaganda under the mountain that the oil they fried themselves in was a cyclical acknowledgement of the universal ecosystem and the interwoven strands of life. He had recoiled in horror upon seeing his best friend’s son being bathed in the hot juices of his ancestors, infusing them into the child’s very skin. No! Far better to be a tortilla, to be baked in the infernal heat of the oven his community so loathed.

And so the wild potato chip set off on an adventure into the great deserts to the south, where the spicy heat cloyed his weak salty pores and the crows hovered in the sky. Hooded to hide his fried shame, the wild potato chip drove through the simmering mirages, clinging to hope of inalienable potato rights the tortillas had built their nation upon. The shadows of spindly trees like cracks upon the hard red earth. Tiny crabs hovered like ghosts upon the cracked rock, exoskeletons from another world.

Suddenly, in the distance, he saw a figure upon the dusty road, curved like a Lays chip, recognizable as one of his own. The wild potato chip’s heart sagged in his salty chest. Where the noble triangle of the tortilla could have begun, was instead a broken, cracked version of his former self. And as he approached the chip’s back split and oil began pumping from the wound in sickly yellow, bubbling and hissing in the sun.

The crows croaked and the crabs shivered to life, their white exoskeletons clunking towards the oil, as if the carcinogenic blood of his ancestors were the only thing that could reanimate them. The potato chip fled the clicking of the crabs, the cawing of the black shadows above him, but as he ran (or rather flopped, as chips have no legs) he could see only the barren wastelands of all the distance he had come, and beyond them the mountains glittering darkly purple.

“You seek the spice of life?” came a juddering voice from behind him, as if composed from the terrible clicking of the skeleton army.

“It is true!” cried the wild chip, turning. But the crabs were already upon him, lifting him, scuttling forward with unreal velocity, bearing him upon a sea of slowly cooking crab bones like the River Styx itself, if the River Styx were made by a fast food factory in Connecticut. Images whirled past. Of paprika and cardamom, of tandoori and green chili, of cinnamon and saffron and great swathes of masala. His vision became fractal, like a trance party in his head except made from smells and innumerable colors, and then suddenly he was thrown to his knees, which he didn’t have, and so slid forward like a potato chip.

“So, the peasant has come at last.” came the voice again. But this time it was softer. And the wild potato chip looked up, beseechingly for an answer, to find an enormous Cheesy Puff looking down upon him. Around him were shelves and shelves and endless shelves of chip packets.

“There are no tortillas.” thundered the Cheesy Puff, its huge orange body wobbling. Plastic bags crinkled in rapturous applause. In the background, “Wannabe” by The Spice Girls was playing faintly over a loudspeaker system.

But as the potato chip came to his senses he saw that he himself had been changed. His edges had been broken, sharpened. The desert had baked him, hardened him. And the spice journey into his own mind had opened up fragrances he had never dreamt of.

As the crabs tore him apart, little chunks of him fell into the cracks of the flooring. There they lay, until they were swept up by a slave chip. They were thrown into the desert cracks and picked up by the wind and taken beyond that into the mountain, where one day another intrepid chip would find them and set his nation free from the oil. But that is a story for both another time… and another tortilla.