The first imitation attempt happened before the provisional ink dried.

It was not sanctioned. It was not measured. It was filmed vertically on a phone with a cracked screen and uploaded with a caption that tried too hard to sound inevitable. The potato was undercooked. The distance was exaggerated. The target—a watermelon duct-taped to a fence—stood in for courage. Still, the clip spread faster than anyone expected, shared not because it was impressive, but because it felt adjacent to something that mattered.

That was how it began.

Within days, attempts multiplied. Parking lots. High school fields. Dry riverbeds. People threw potatoes, yams, frozen turkeys, wrapped bricks, anything that could be made to approximate the shape and risk of the original act. Most throws were short. Some were painful. A few were genuinely alarming. Hashtags bloomed, then fractured into subgenres, each insisting it understood the point better than the others.

Officials scrambled.

Statements were issued clarifying that the original event had involved “extensive safeguards,” though the footage suggested otherwise. Committees proposed temporary bans on “distance projectile feats involving organic matter.” The language grew stranger the more seriously it was taken. Enforcement lagged behind enthusiasm, as it always did.

The little man watched none of it.

He had returned to Woodburn quietly, slipping back into the geography that had shaped him. The streets were the same. The lots still empty. Someone had spray-painted a potato with wings on the side of a boarded-up building. He did not stop to look at it for long.

People recognized him, though. Not everyone. Not all at once. Recognition came in glances held a beat too long, in conversations that paused when he entered a room. A teenager asked him to sign a sack of russets outside a grocery store. He declined politely and carried on.

At home, he unpacked the same small bag he’d taken with him. The silence felt heavier than the crowd ever had. Silence demanded interpretation. Noise merely insisted.

In the wider world, the narrative continued to metastasize.

Universities hosted panels. Ethics professors argued late into the night about spectacle and agency, about whether meaning could survive replication or if it inevitably collapsed under repetition. A think piece went viral arguing that the throw was not a feat of strength but of refusal—the refusal to accept scale as limitation. Another declared it a symptom of cultural decay, citing bread-and-circus metaphors that had not aged well the first time.

The boy was interviewed once.

He sat carefully in his chair, feet not touching the floor, answering questions with an economy that frustrated producers. When asked how he felt about the imitators, he thought for a long moment.

“They are throwing different things,” he said finally.

It was unclear whether this was dismissal or wisdom. The clip was replayed endlessly, often without context.

As weeks passed, the attempts grew more elaborate. Platforms were built. Distances marked. Rules proposed, then ignored. Someone tried to trademark a phrase involving starch and destiny and was publicly shamed into withdrawing it. Injuries occurred. Nothing catastrophic—nothing that could stop momentum—but enough to sharpen concern.

Pressure mounted for the little man to speak.

Invitations arrived: conferences, endorsements, televised debates framed as conversations. He declined them all. His refusal became its own kind of statement, interpreted wildly depending on who was doing the interpreting. Silence, it turned out, was not neutral. It was provocative.

One afternoon, a letter arrived.

Handwritten. No return address. The paper was thin, the ink slightly smeared, as if written somewhere humid. The boy’s handwriting, careful and slanted. He thanked the little man for not speaking for him. He said people kept asking what it felt like, and he never knew how to answer because feelings, once named, became smaller. He said he was back in school now. He said he still practiced standing very still.

The little man folded the letter and placed it in a drawer. He did not respond, but something in his chest loosened, just slightly.

That night, the world record committee announced a final decision.

The record would stand.

With conditions.

Future attempts would require stricter guidelines, enhanced protections, clearer definitions of acceptable targets and materials. The announcement was met with muted approval and immediate skepticism. Guidelines had a way of trailing reality, not leading it.

The market reacted predictably. Interest dipped, then stabilized. Some imitators moved on. Others doubled down, convinced that meaning only emerged when risk brushed up against prohibition.

And then, just as the noise threatened to settle into permanence, something unexpected happened.

People stopped throwing.

Not all at once. Not universally. But enough to be noticeable. The videos slowed. The hashtags lost urgency. Attention drifted, as it always did, toward the next impossible thing. The throw remained singular—not because it could not be repeated, but because repetition failed to summon whatever had been present that day.

In Woodburn, autumn arrived.

Leaves fell into empty lots. The little man walked the same routes he always had, hands in pockets, unremarkable again. Once, a child asked him how far he could throw now.

He thought about it.

“Far enough,” he said.

The child seemed satisfied.

Somewhere, in a stadium already booked for something else entirely, grass grew back over the scars. The field forgot. The banners were repurposed. The moment receded into story, into argument, into memory.

But not quite into history.

Because history required an ending.

And this—whatever it was—had not finished asking its question yet.