The Sweet Potato
By Timmy T. Tater, Editor and Chief Spud
Being a True and Accurate Account of Events, More or Less
It started, as most legendary days do, at 12:59 in the afternoon, when the ground beneath Cooter, Missouri decided it had simply had enough.
A 4.0 on the Richter scale. Not catastrophic, but not nothing — the geological equivalent of a large, irritated man slamming a door two houses down. Hard enough to crack a chimney, rattle every dish in every cabinet in town, and send a truly impressive fissure through the parking lot of the Casey’s General Store that the locals would later describe, with great authority and zero geological training, as “a real good one.”
Mason jars flew off Brenda Futrell’s shelf. Two hound dogs looked up from their naps, then at each other, then back down. And Dale Prichard sprinted out of the Dollar General in his socks, arms pinwheeling, screaming “EVERYBODY OUT, THE WHOLE THING’S GOING!”
The local news van arrived forty minutes later. The reporter, a twenty-three-year-old from Doniphan named Cody, asked Dale what the earthquake felt like.
“Like when my cousin Trent sits down hard on the couch,” Dale said, gravely. “Except Trent’s the size of a refrigerator and the couch is Missouri.”
That aired at five.
By then, half of Cooter was standing in their yards, doing that thing people do after earthquakes where they discuss it with enormous authority despite having absolutely no seismological training whatsoever. Brenda said the New Madrid Fault was “fixin’ to let ‘er rip — the big one.” Gary Hutchens said he’d read online that catfish in the Mississippi act weird before a major event, and he’d seen some real weird catfish just last Thursday. Nobody asked Gary what “weird” meant. Nobody needed to.
The earthquake, for its part, was embarrassed and did not return.
Meanwhile, approximately forty-seven miles to the east, the city of Paducah, Kentucky was in full bloom for the Annual Quilt Show, and if you think a 4.0 earthquake was going to interrupt that, you have clearly never met a serious quilter.
The show had drawn 35,000 attendees from forty-two states, and the lobby of the convention center smelled magnificently of hand lotion, cinnamon roll, and focused competitive energy. Women from Iowa were photographing a Storm at Sea pattern with the intensity of crime scene photographers. A retired schoolteacher from Dothan, Alabama had been standing in front of the same Double Wedding Ring quilt for twenty-five minutes and showed no signs of leaving.
The earthquake tremor reached Paducah as a noticeable, genuine wobble — enough to make a few ceiling lights sway and cause one woman to spill approximately a third of her complimentary coffee.
She looked at the ceiling. She looked at the quilt. She looked back at the ceiling.
She stayed at the quilt.
One woman — her name tag said MARGE, TERRE HAUTE — did react more strongly, grabbing her tote bag and bracing against the wall with the focused calm of someone who had been through a lot of things and classified this as roughly a four out of ten on the alarming scale. She waited, verified the building was still standing, said “Mm,” and went back to examining the hand-stitching on a Baltimore Album that was, objectively, the finest thing any human being had ever produced.
Not a single quilt was dropped.
Out in the parking lot, seventeen lifted trucks sat parked at angles that suggested their owners had given up on lane markings entirely — noses pointed skyward, back ends squatting low like they were doing a reluctant curtsy. They were the trucks of husbands who had been brought to the quilt show and were now sitting in camp chairs eating gas station chicken and pizza, waiting for their wives with the contented patience of golden retrievers. They had definitely felt the earthquake.
“Felt it,” said one.
“Yep,” said another.
“New Madrid,” said a third.
“Catfish were acting weird,” said a fourth.
Nobody knew that fourth man. He had simply appeared.
Speaking of those trucks — because we must speak of those trucks — the Carolina Squat had reached peak penetration in the quad-state area. The style involves lifting the front of the truck several inches while the rear sags down, creating a silhouette that suggests the vehicle is either about to take a dramatic bow or has been lightly sat upon by something very large and very deliberate.
No one can agree on who started this.
The trucks’ owners argue it looks cool.
The trucks’ owners’ wives could not be reached for comment, because they were inside the quilt show.
Engineers note that the stance compromises headlight alignment, making the trucks effectively blind at night — simultaneously the most visible vehicles on the road and the least able to see where they’re going — a metaphor so apt it practically writes the country song by itself.
Meanwhile, somewhere in a high school gymnasium, a teenager in a rented tuxedo was climbing INTO one of these trucks to take his girlfriend to prom, which required him to essentially scale a small ladder to reach the cab while she — in a formal gown and heels the height of a modest building — attempted to follow.
This took eleven minutes.
It was, nonetheless, considered deeply romantic. There are photographs. The truck is in all of them. The truck is the main character.
This is prom season in the region, and it is a full contact sport. The mums alone — those magnificent, bewildering corsage-adjacent floral constructions that exist only in certain specific zip codes — now come in sizes that require structural support. One young woman at Massac County High School was photographed wearing a mum so large it contained a working battery-operated light strand, three cowbells, a small stuffed animal, and what appeared to be a laminated copy of her freshman year schedule. She looked incredible. She looked like a float. She will remember this mum longer than she will remember calculus, and she is correct to.
Across town, a television played in the back of the Dairy Queen, and on it: Andy Beshear.
The Governor of Kentucky was speaking about the University of Kentucky athletics department, and the situation had reached the point where even people who didn’t particularly follow college sports had opinions — which is the surest sign that something has gone truly, publicly sideways.
“He’s not wrong,” said Karen Embry, eating a Blizzard.
“Nope,” said her husband Mike, who had not followed college sports since 1987 but was nodding with conviction.
“He’s not wrong,” said the man behind the counter.
“He’s really not,” said a woman who had only stopped in to use the restroom and had become briefly detained by the television.
This is the remarkable thing: the UK athletics situation had achieved that rare civic status where everyone — the quilters, the earthquake survivors of Cooter, the prom kids scaling lifted trucks, the men in the parking lot discussing catfish behavior — had all arrived at the same conclusion. Andy Beshear had said the thing. The thing needed saying. Democrats AND Republicans nodded in full agreement-a breakthrough…maybe?
There are perhaps four issues in American life capable of producing this kind of unanimous regional consensus. This had become one of them. UK fans, non-UK fans, people who thought Wildcats was a nature documentary — all looked at the screen and said, more or less, yeah, that tracks.
And then someone in the Dairy Queen said: “Who’s coming to the luncheon Saturday?”
And Mike Embry set down his spoon.
“Luncheon,” he said.
“Luncheon,” Karen confirmed.
“Why,” said Mike, “is it a luncheon and not just a lunch?”
This question, once introduced, proved impossible to remove from the room.
Why luncheon? What is the -eon doing there? Is it French, because if it’s French, I DONT WANT IT? Is it Latin? Is it the sound a fancy spoon makes against good china? And if lunch gets a formal upgrade to luncheon, what about the other meals?
Is there a breakfaston? A grand, solemn morning affair where eggs Benedict are delivered with ceremony, everyone sits up very straight, and the orange juice is referred to as a “citrus arrangement”?
Is there a supperon? Imagined immediately as a Victorian dinner party where a butler appears in the doorway and announces “Supperon is served,” and everyone files in from the parlor while a string quartet plays something mournful about biscuits and the gravy boat has its own name?
And — critically — if brunch already exists as a portmanteau of breakfast and lunch, does bruncheon exist? Should it? It feels like it should. A bruncheon sounds like something that happens on a yacht, or perhaps aboard the Mississippi Queen — possibly docked in Paducah on quilt show weekend, at that $10 million boat dock downtown that gets so overrun with vessels you have to book a slip months in advance. (eye roll)
The catfish man spoke up from the corner.
“I’ve been to a bruncheon,” he said.
“No you haven’t,” said Karen.
“I have,” he said, serene and certain. “Memphis. 2009. Mimosas, breakfast-ish Bar-B-Que and a quilt raffle.”
Everyone looked at him for a long moment.
He took a long sip of his Coke.
Outside, the squatting trucks gleamed in the April sun. The quilters quilted. Cooter rested, genuinely shaken for once. Prom kids slow-danced somewhere in a gymnasium that smelled like hairspray and ambition. Andy Beshear was still, probably, right.
And somewhere under the New Madrid Seismic Zone, a very large fault stretched, cracked its knuckles, and considered its options.
The catfish were acting weird.
—END—
Dale now runs on pure adrenaline and civic alarm, which is honestly more relatable anyway. And a 4.0 is nothing to sneeze at — that’s enough to crack chimneys, slosh swimming pools, and give Gary Hutchens real ammunition for his catfish theory for at least another decade.