Small potatoes

Mother was cursing the gophers again.  Harriet sat at the kitchen table banging a spoon on her dish, which was empty as always., and John was reading through the Artisan Bread cookbook that he'd stolen from a bookshop.  Dr. Lavatorial went outside, to see if Mother would do anything this time.
Mother was crouched on the ground, laying colourful stones in intricate patterns.  As each line of her pattern completed she muttered words that were hard to hear, or perhaps hard to understand.  They sounded like real words, but always she mumbled just the syllable Dr. Lavatorial needed in order to be certain of what she'd said.  He reached out, intending to move one of the stones and see what Mother would do, but she slapped his hand away before he came within six inches.  He paused; he was sure Mother's reach wasn't long enough to do that.
The banging of the spoon from the kitchen stopped, and yet somehow Mother's words were still slightly too unclear to make out.  Then she put the last of her stones down, stood up, and stepped back.
Mother was much shorter than Dr. Lavatorial; if she and her two sisters had stood on one another's shoulders to make a towering person they'd still only have just reached up to his eyebrows.  She pointed at the garden, made a hand-sign that meant 'gopher', and cursed them again.  The coloured stones flashed once, very brightly, and all over the garden gophers were fired out of holes, and in some cases bushes, lifting eighteen or twenty feet into the air with their little tails on fire, before falling back to the ground, often dead, but sometimes still twitching.
Dr. Lavatorial rubbed his eyes, wondering if he'd really just seen an hydraulic expression of gopher from a suburban garden, but the little corpses and near-corpses still littered the back garden.  The coloured stones were fading, as though their colour were running out to somewhere else, and most of them now looked cracked.  Mother knelt back down by them, sorting through them, and pocketed three that looked undamaged and still colourful.  She made a purring sound, a noise Dr. Lavatorial interpreted as pleasure.
"Harriet!" called Mother, her voice at the upper range of Dr. Lavatorial's hearing.  He rubbed his eyes again, and adjusted his bionic ears to a wider range. "Harriet, bring in the potatoes."  Harriet came running, carrying a very-wide bladed shovel that Dr. Lavatorial hadn't seen before. He knew for a fact that Harriet hadn't eaten anything in four days, so he hoped that the potatoes were easy to dig up.  She made a beeline for the nearest plant and plunged the spade into the earth.  She dug ferociously, throwing earth alternately over each shoulder into two wide, messy piles, with plenty of small soil particles lifted into the breeze and pelting both Mother and Dr. Lavatorial.  The soil was friable because there hadn't been any rain either for the last few days, and soon she was down to a blacker, damper, loam, still following the pale line of the plant's root.  Then there was a thump as her blade struck something.
Dr. Lavatorial watched as she probed around the hard thing, finding the edges, then slipped the shovel's wide blade down one side of it, and levered it up.  He was expecting a rock, or perhaps a house-brick, but instead a much large section of earth moved, and as soon as the bottom of it came free of the earth Harriet had seized it, abandoning the shovel, and dragging it out of her hole with much grunting and panting.
"Potatoes!" she shrieked, even higher pitched than Mother.  "Small potatoes!"
She had unearthed a chest, which looked like it was made of the matted and lignified roots of the potato plant.  When he prised one side open, potatoes spilled out and Mother ran over at once, swatting at Harriet's head and making her put the potatoes back inside.  Then she was made to pick the chest up and carry it over to the outside door to the root cellar, where Mother took it off her and carried it proudly in.
Dr. Lavatorial went back into the kitchen feeling slightly puzzled, and found that John had stopped reading and was now boiling a tea-towel with a hungry look in his eyes.

Master Licko

Mr Eaves was based on the proportions of Mrs Eaves, but Master Licko took some liberty with his design. Where Mrs Eaves was statuesque Mr Eaves took on a stretched-out appearance. Where Mrs Eaves had sharp, bird-like features, Mr Eaves's became cruelly sharp, and elements of both the crow and the vulture fought together. And where Mrs Eaves had the usual number of limbs, Master Licko forgot himself completely and gave Mr Eaves three arms and eight legs. When Marianne, who had commissioned the Eaves's from Master Licko, came to the shop to collect them, she was appalled.
"This is a travesty of what I asked for!" she said, her voice going high-pitched as she waved her arms around agitatedly. Glendinning the butler hurried behind her, escorting motile statues out of her way. "I wanted a normal, human couple for my menagerie. I see them all the time on their television shows, and the men do not look like... that." She pointed for effect and her arm telescoped out nearly skewering Master Licko.
"How will they mate and have children?" she said.
Master Licko had been looking sheepish up until now, aware suddenly that his little design liberties had once again built up into a rather big liberty that was looking as though it might be expensive to retreat from, but when she mentioned children he turned pale.
"Glendinning!" he snapped. The butler, still wrestling with the statue of the Madonna in Heat which was reluctant to leave the Inspiration for David alone, looked up. "Glendinning, the specification for the Eaves's. Quickly now."
As it was, I had the specification to hand as I'd been expecting Marianne's upset, so I waved it at Glendinning who was being straddled by the Madonna who was trying to use him as a springboard.
Master Licko seized the specification from my hands and turned the pages quickly, skimming each in turn and muttering imprecations under his breath. Suddenly he stopped and read more slowly, turning the page, then turning back again. He looked at Marianne.
"There's no requirement in here for the Eaves's to be capable of reproduction."
"Well why would there be, silly? All humans reproduce. It's what most of their television shows are about." Not all though, as we knew. The religious collector had refused the Madonna in Heat precisely because she apparently was well-known for not reproducing, or at least, not like that.
"If it's not the spec, then I don't have to deliver it. It so happens," he raised a hand to forestall her fury, "that the base model I use is normally fertile, so they well be able to have children, but it's not a guarantee and you didn't ask for it."
"What do you say?" Marianne stared at me, her eyes white and vacant as always.
"Legal stuff, mostly, I'm Master Licko's lawyer-at-arms."
"I see. Well, he's still got too many legs! Pull some off him."
Master Licko licked his lips delicately. "They're quickened already. That means that they can feel pain."
"I don't care! Do it, or I'll refuse the order."
"I can't."
"He actually can't," I said smoothly. "The law states that once they've been quickened they have to be treated humanely."
"And what does humanely mean?" Marianne had an odd smirk on her face now.
"Legally, we use it to mean treat them the way they'd treat each other."
"Then you can pull his legs off," she said, tasting victory. "Because they're absolutely vile to each other much of the time. Just turn to channel 31 and see."
"The war-zone, sir," said Glendinning.
And so it was, after much argument and disagreement, that Mr Eaves was induced to stand on a land-mine and have almost six of his extra limbs blown off, bringing him a little closer in shape to Mrs Eaves and probably doing dreadful things to his sanity at the same time.