Delicious

The berries brought on the madness but the people ate them anyway. They couldn’t help it. The berries were delicious. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner; billionaire, beggar, and babe – the people of the planet gobbled berries by the fistful, desperate and craven, cramming fruits down their throats frantic always for more more more. And the fruits themselves! Winking diodes clustered like inverted pyramids; dew drop orbs, crystalline translucent – twisted aloft to the burning orange sun would elicit alembicated hues of indigo-violet-vermillion; peering deeper now, beneath the skin, a complex shadow-play of Rorschach shapes; veined spore tangled and billowing like nebulae unfurling. They were mesmerising; ensorcelling; a vortex. You could never have just one… But the real pleasure began when lips met flesh in heady lust and stained teeth tingling with that first electric shock pierced release in a sudden jet the wild, abstruse epiphany of taste as tongue now alive with vibrant violent shockwaves of delight swallowed into the body a trill of pure deliciousness. The fruits were like nothing else in the history of the planet. Tiny morsels of moreself; heady drug and body of the deity; canape and seven-course-meal; resplendent tea and redneck moonshine: whatever the imbiber’s appetite the berries provided in abundance. Well. At least. The illusion of... For you see the more the people ate the hungrier they felt. And the more they imbibed the more ravenous they became. They gorged! They ravaged! They munched and chewed and sucked and swallowed. They clutched by the handful and gnashed with mouthes open, juices squirting down both cheeks, eyes glazed at the sundry pleasures of the glut, the frenzy, the feast. Yet were they satisfied? Did they cease? Did their endless appetites sate? No. They were hollow. It was like eating bubbles. Even as their stuffed stomachs were crammed and bloated their wailing moans rose as one in a pitiful chorus of perpetual hunger. They awoke reaching for berries. They fell asleep with berries staining their pillows. The fruits grew wild through the planet, tangled up brickwork in the cities, vines strangling the ruins of their once-peaceful metropolises, and yet the people died of starvation. From whence the berries sprung nobody quite recalled. And yet in a few short decades the berry-eaters could not remember a time before; if you were to ask them, they would have said they’d always eaten the fruits. They forgot how to cook. They forgot the names of their favourite meals. They forgot the words for eggs, for milk, for rice, for chicken, for table, for kitchen, for menu. They forgot cuisines, and so they forgot their cultures. And as their bodies became frail and withered and suffered from lack of nutrition, as their minds broke down, the people cared little. The berries brought on the madness, oh yes, and the people ate them anyway. They couldn’t help it. The madness was delicious.