Vivid as actual.

"Willful Creatures" by Aimee Bender is a collection of magical realism short stories, many of them (especially the early ones) fairly disturbing. As the collection progresses, however, the stories become increasingly more poignant, and to me, so very beautiful.

My favorite is the one called "Dearth," which tells the story of a woman who wakes up one morning to find seven potatoes in a pot on her stove. She didn't order these potatoes or buy them in the store -- she doesn't even particularly like potatoes -- so she throws them out.

They come back the next day.

This repeats for several days, as she grows more frustrated by their existence and tries a number of different ways to get rid of them, even mailing them to Ireland.

During the struggle, the potatoes start growing into little potato babies: "Her heart pulled its curtain as she held each potato up to the bare hanging lightbulb and looked at its hint of neck, its almost torso, its small backside. Each of the seven had ten very tiny indented toes and ten whispers of fingertips."

She still tries to get rid of them, even resorting to eating one. When only six come back the next day, she is horrified and wracked with grief.

By the eighth month, the potato babies are fully formed, and in the nine month, they come tumbling out of the pot and are these moving, living things. She steadfastly ignores them and eventually buries them in the backyard, reasoning that they belong in the ground anyway. It's then that she feels like something is missing in her life: "She sat for long spells, over the course of the next week, and watched the sky drift overhead. It all felt very familiar, and she recognized the shape and texture of her life before, but it was if someone had put her old life in the laundry and washed it wrong."

At the end of the week she digs them back up and the potato children are fine. She takes them to the cemetary to visit the graves of her mother, father and brother, and on the way home, it rains. The potato children are entranced by the rain. And it is here where the author writes some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read:

"They seemed to enjoy it, tilting their faces to the sky. She had never seen them wet before, and rain, falling on their dirty potato bodies, smelled just like Mother at the sink, washing. Mother, who had died so many years ago, now as vivid as actual, scrubbing potatoes at the kitchen sink before breakfast. How many times had she done that? Year after year after year. Lighting the new fire of the morning. Humming. Her skirt so easy on her waist. Her hands so confident at the sink. They were that memory, created. Holding their potato hands up, they let the rain pour down their potato arms, their potato knees and legs, and the woman breathed in the smell of them, over and over, as deeply as she could. For here was grandmother, greeting her grandchildren, gathering them in her arms, and covering their wide faces with kisses."