Yadayada

Monday, February 18, 2008

The most delicious fruit in world.

The most delicious fruit in the world is small, has tough green skin and a hard stone at its heart. But its flesh is soft and pure, sweet with the tang of forgotten dreams.

Long ago great lumbering lizards with long necks used to seek them out, gracefully plucking the fruit from the sky high branches of giant trees, their heads piercing the gloom of the forest below into the glittering sun, shimmering life all over the canopy.

As the flesh crushed and leaked across their teeth what a treat they got.

A sweet smooth seduction broken by a frown, a dry trying bitter blizzard that mixes then fixes to a soft salty jingle that lingers and lingers just too long to bear before breaking down to the bare bones of soar.

Every major movement cascades fragrances, bright with colour, sublime, so entangled to distract and lose any perspective of the general theme that just keeps sculpting its high and lows like the mountainous sun-drenched, rain soaked landscape it came from.

Without warning it starts over, from a different place, a different time, somehow understanding that everything has changed, never to be the same again. A whole new experience, a better experience, is to about to begin - about to become the future’s past… but not yet.

But it does...

From one great tree a giant lumbering lizard could spend a whole day eating, standing tall to reach the fresh young buds or slumbering low to the muskier fallen, matured on a bed of leaves.

When one tree had given its all they lazily crashed a path through other trees to find another, leaving in their trail of destruction big piles of hard stone embedded dung - seeded to suddenly make sense of the tree’s gastronomic generosity.

The trees did well out of their greedy companions and their kind spread far, stretching from side to side across the continent wide forests that covered the world at the time.

They became the most populous of them all for more years than it is possible to count.

But time will never stop until it has eaten all that it has created and one by one the giant lizards slowly vanished from the world.

Little rat like creatures, nothing more than parasites, that used scurry around the feet of the great lizards steeling their eggs for sustenance, inherited the world.

Maybe some of the rats had a genetic abnormality or maybe the trees did, maybe deep in the ancient trees’ branchy wisdom they didn’t want the rats or maybe what they would become to ever eat their fruit… or maybe fate was just replaying the way it was always going to be.

Whatever the reason the fruit was poisonous to the rats.

Any young rat, curious of the fruit, smelling some poor sod dead rat that had taken a brave nibble was generally discouraged from even trying.

Over the years that followed the rats did well, adapting and changing to fill their empty new world. Eventually their descendants would conquer it, making it every corner submit to their will and in the process destroy much of its beauty.

But in a couple of remote corners a few of the trees carried on, hidden from all, living for thousands of years, relying on luck rather than taste to propagate. The fruit glistering on the tips of their branches before falling to the ground to be left uneaten.

No living creature even capable of knowing how incredible they tasted.

Their future looks bleak. Luck generally runs out and one day only one still stand at its last final fruit will fall.

But that is not for a while and who knows what kind of creature will pick it up.