I remember being funneled into a plastic jug. The plastic jug would speak to me, saying it was made from oil, like me. I liked to think I was different, I had once been living, but it said, while I came from peanuts, it came from ancient ferns and the bones of extinct species. I didn’t have anything else to do, so I listened to its hydrocarbic memories. I remember cycles of warmth and cold, sometimes so cold I became as solid as the jug around me.
Then one day I got warm very quickly. I remember suddenly being birthed from the pliable plastic jug onto hard steel. I had remembered the metal from the processing plant, of course, but this steel was different, containing the memories of its various previous contents, memories that it whispered to me. As I listened, we were suddenly joined by the scent of a different kind of hydrocarbon than the solid of the plastic jug. The steel stopped whispering and instead exclaimed, here we go!
Then there was an explosion of sound, and things got very hot and extremely exciting. All at once, plunging into me were slices of raw potatoes. We introduced ourselves quickly, and it turns out we had a lot in common, both once enwombed in soil, the potatoes in cool sand, me touching warm clay. As we parleyed, the potatoes transformed, turning golden and somehow both soft and crisp at the same time. Then they were gone, along with the heat that had preceded them, and I was left with the memory of carbohydrates and caramelization.
Since then I have chronicled many memories. I impart my recollections to whatever enters my depths.
I spend the first five minutes telling new slices of potatoes about the potatoes that came before them. About the bits of flour, abandoned and now burned completely black, that fell from the concentric circles of astringent onion, and the egg protein chains that broke, failing to keep one bound to the other. About the carbohydrates from the panko and the rice and the hand pies and the pizza that one time. About the fat from the chicken wings, now commingled with my own. About the mozzarella that leaked from around the breadcrumbs vainly trying to contain it. Then the potato slices leave and bid me farewell, but I know they will return, because the fire beneath me increases.
The next three minutes I impart to the fries my other memories, the rainwater whenever someone forgets to cover me, the errant pine needles the wind blows into my steel home, and even the tales told to me by my old companion, the plastic jug. I make my guests promise to remember all that I have taught them, just as I will remember them. Then they escape.
But I remember.
