mashed potatoes, part one: the transformation into a reasonably useless superhero

story i began writing off a prompt from my creative writing class. part one of...idk how many. haha.

       Mr. Korea (pronounced core-ay-uh) lived across the street from the Masher family in the small town of Greensville, North Dakota. He was well into his eighties and had a bit of trouble with his memory, although he had never been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It was because of his faulty memory that the Mashers' eldest son, Mitch, became a local hero all the townspeople admired.
       Mr. Korea was known for his unusually delicious home-grown potatoes. He had a garden in his front lawn that was kept solely for growing his prized potatoes. Outlining the garden was an army of gnomes, which Mr. Korea said "protected the garden from the rattlesnakes." There were no rattlesnakes in Greensville, North Dakota. One day, Mr. Korea, out of the generosity that senior citizens so often have (for example, when your grandparents give you tons of cash on your birthday), decided to give some homemade mashed potatoes to his kind neighbors, the Mashers.
       But the potatoes they were made out of were not regular potatoes. You see, Mr. Korea's memory had slipped by come the day he was supposed to fertilize the potato plants. Acid rain was a rare occasion in Greensville, but it just so happened that it poured all day long, pounding into the soil the potatoes were growing in and allowing the plants' roots to soak up the contaminated water. To the human eye, though, the grown potatoes looked perfectly healthy.
       Mr. Korea brought his mashed potatoes over to the Mashers' house in a plastic Tupperware bowl. His slippers made scuffing noises on the pavement as he walked to their front door. He tucked the bowl under one arm and rang the doorbell, whistling while he waited for someone to answer.
       Mitchell Masher, approximately seventeen years, four months, and twenty-seven days old, with brown hair and matching brown eyes, six-foot-two-inches tall, came to the door.
       "Oh, hi there Mr. Korea," Mitch said as he opened the screen door. "How are you?"
       "Fine, just fine!"  Mr. Korea beamed, his eyes crinkling up behind his wiry spectacles. "I made some of my special mashed potatoes and I thought I'd give you folks a batch!"
       Mrs. Masher, aged forty-one years, two months, and nine days old, with blond hair and brown eyes at five-foot-six-inches, came to the door just then.
       "Well hello there, Mr. Korea," she said, looking a little uncomfortable. She felt awkward around Mr. Korea because he frequently called her Patty, the name of her sister whom she loathed, instead of her own name, Petunia.
       "I was just telling your son here about my homemade mashed potatoes!" he exclaimed. "I thought I would stop by and let your family have the first batch, to see how they taste." He smiled, showing his perfectly aligned dentures.
       "Oh, well that's so kind of you! I was just finishing up dinner but we could always have a side dish…"
       Mr. Korea laughed heartily and handed the Tupperware container to Mrs. Masher. "Yes, yes, and there's always leftovers!" he chuckled again and strolled back down the sidewalk to his house without so much as a goodbye.
       "Mitch," Mrs. Masher said to her son once the old man was out of earshot, "Something about that man's memory makes me wonder if these potatoes are even edible or not." She chuckled and walked inside to the kitchen to set the bowl down on the kitchen table. "Dinner'll be ready in five."
       "I have to read three more chapters for English," Mitch said. "Save me some food to heat up later tonight, okay?"
       "Fine, fine," Mrs. Masher said. "But no more of this procrastination! This is the third time this week you've skipped eating dinner with the family." Mitch nodded and headed upstairs to the attic, his room.
       Mitch Masher read for a few hours, getting totally engrossed in the novel his English class was reading. He was four chapters ahead of the rest of the class when, all of a sudden, he noticed an emptiness in his stomach. A gnawing, aching feeling. A feeling he recognized as…hunger.
       Mitch looked at the clock and realized that it was now 11:08 p.m. He had missed dinner entirely. He walked downstairs to find his father asleep in front of the TV, and his mother and sister already in bed. He walked into the kitchen for a nearly-midnight snack. He peered into the fridge, but his family hadn't spared him any leftovers.
       Mitch sighed and looked around the kitchen. In the dim light shining in from the living room he spied the Tupperware container Mr. Korea had brought over earlier that evening. He sighed heavily and scooped himself a nice heaping serving of the taters onto a paper plate, then put it in the microwave. As the dish rotated in the electromagnetic waves, Mitch Masher got himself some silverware and leaned against the kitchen counter. The timer beeped, and he took Mr. Korea's special mashed potatoes out of the microwave and began to eat away.
       There was something strange to the taste of the mashed potatoes, though. Something kind of metallic-y to it. But Mitch shrugged it off, chugged a glass of water, and put his silverware in the dish washer. He brushed his teeth and went back upstairs, crawling into bed for as good a night's sleep one can get when you're waking up in less than six hours.
       Little did Mitch Masher know that over the course of those less-than-six hours, he would undergo a transformation. The electromagnetic waves from the microwave had reacted with the dormant chemicals in the mashed potatoes and had caused them to be radioactive. The radioactivity reacted with chemicals inside Mitch Masher's body and caused him to develop unusual abilities mere humans would never have. These quirks Mitch developed caused him to be…superhuman.

Author's Note

how do you think this will turn out? does it have enough humor? critique please, i never write fiction!!

Reviews

[Danny K]

If you were trying to be funny, it feels like you were trying to hard. I got a couple of chuckles though. You need to be a little bit more witty when it comes to the narration and work on throwing in some one-liners.