There’s this bush right beside my spot here on the steps that looks just like the apple trees my sister draws. It’s round and green and seems lit up with bright red berries. Mom must have known I wanted to eat those berries the first day we moved here since she made a point to tell me and Toni not to eat them. She instructed us very clearly saying, “Be sure to leave those berries alone. They’re poisonous to people. They’re only good for birds.” And of course that very second I wanted to be a bird so I could fly down and eat the bright berries right off of the bush.
Dropping my paper and crayons, I take a good look at what makes for a poison berry. It’s just good manners to take a closer peek at the things nature has put out there for you to see. Snap, snap, snap, the berries drop off easy, like they almost wanted to be plucked. The peanut sized fruits look so bright and juicy in my hand, like three tiny red balloons without strings, just calling to be popped.
I toss two of them aside, their weighty round juiciness bouncing once in the grass then landing for good, full and still. The third gets squished between my fingers with excited anticipation of what human poison actually looks like. A filmy blob with clear juice and tiny seeds spurts out the berry’s small opening. It’s not black or ugly like you’d expect poison to be, but see-through and maybe even clean, pure, like the birds who eat it.
The second I lick the mash of poison and seeds off my fingers a cramp forms tight around my stomach. Wondering about the effects of this personal experiment, I peer suspiciously toward the bush. It crosses my mind that the beauty of the berries could have been a trick to attract kids like me who’re dumb enough to take chances with poison. I can’t be too sure. But then again nature wouldn’t do anything to hurt me. It couldn’t.
