Mr. Potato Head by Meg Pokrass

Theme: The Fool | Micro #1

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today we present you our first ever Micro of the Month! We received 473 entries for this call which was open for just three days and it was especially difficult to pick a winner. Ultimately, Meg’s charming piece emerged as the most delightful and also with a sweet spin on our April theme of The Fool.

MOTM submissions will always open the first three days of each month and the theme will be announced either the day before or the day of. For May, you’ll get an email on April 30 for the May theme alongside the submission link.

All submission call posts will have a dedicated section now and you can turn notifications for these posts and emails on or off here.

That year Mr Potato Head became Anya’s changeable dad. He wasn’t a mad dad or a bad dad or a sad dad or a rad dad. He was kind, simple, mute. Wore a blue plastic hat and had flabby lips. His pets were sea monkeys and his friends were matchstick people and his eyes were round as moons as they stared straight ahead in a foolish way. As a nose, she screwed in a pink ear. He looked like a misunderstood dork, off-kilter but kind— the sort of person one might meet at the grocery store and feel sorry for, the kind of man her mother, once she grew nicer again, might invite over for a bowl of homemade vegetable soup. After a while, shoots grew out of his head. When Anya felt mad at him she poked in a villainous moustache and sunglasses, replaced his ear-nose with a bulbous orange blob. Then, she took him for a ride all over the neighbourhood, potato juice stinking up her fingers.

Contributor’s Note

Write about a toy and expand into a bigger metaphor

There’s a good deal of unspoken backstory in “Mr. Potato Head”. It’s told from the point of view of a young character who was removed, when very young, from her unstable father and who now lives alone with her angry, divorced mother. The micro derives its strength from small physical details about what having “a dad” means from her changing perspective. It is a collage piece of imaginary masculine features and vague memories of a father, never knowing what to make of him in hindsight. It is also a story of how sad it is, to Anya, that her mother has become closed off and untrusting. The plot, if you wish to call it that, is internal, psychological. Anya is trying to make sense of it all by doing something active (ie making a changeable version of a dad by swapping his features) and she takes the reader on this exploratory journey. I love writing from a child’s point of view. Kids are highly creative and resilient, which balances the fact that they are also endlessly vulnerable and too trusting.

MEG POKRASS is the author of The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies, including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International; Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023 and 2025; Wigleaf Top 50; and numerous literary magazines including Electric Literature, Hunger Mountain, New England Review, McSweeney’s, Five Points, Waxwing, Washington Square Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. Meg is the founding editor of New Flash Fiction Review, and the founding/managing editor of Best Microfiction.