The Child and the Raspberry: A Prairie Fable

by AlexM

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In a house near the prairie town of Anntown there lived a small child who liked to pick raspberries from the plants growing around the house.

The family cultivated the fruits with wires and careful grooming and nets to keep the birds away. The child, still too small to do more than pull weeds from the soil when directed by an adult, spent some time each day wandering through the plants and plucking the fattest raspberries from the green branches. This was permitted, provided the child ate every one for lunch. But each day, the child took too many, and one of the adults took the rest for pudding and scolded the child, saying, “You should not be so greedy!”

The next day, the child had forgotten the words and again plucked too many fat, red berries to eat.

On one of these days, the child found a particularly large raspberry lying on the soil near one of the plants. This raspberry was so large that it covered over half of the child’s palm. Imagine how many sweet mouthfuls it would provide! Crying out in excitement, the child picked it up and examined it. No other raspberry had ever grown so large on the green branches!

Then the child saw another raspberry on the ground, equally large, and grabbed at it, imagining how delicious lunch would be.

But the child’s small fingers only splashed against water, over and over.

The second raspberry was a reflection, the child realised.

And while the child had fumbled in the water for a raspberry that didn’t exist, a bird had snatched the real one and flown away. If only the child had not been so greedy, lunch that day would have been more than four un-exceptional berries.

Sweet Baby Honey

by Jason Fischer

Is that a rustling among the cobwebs at Cabal central? Unfamiliar footfalls in our dusty corridors? It is, in fact, a new Cabalist approaching, the first of several who’ll be joining us in coming weeks.

Please welcome Jason Fischer, who debuts today with something a bit on the dark side. You can learn a bit more about him from the members link above. (One quick errata, Jason’s blurb link at left didn’t come out quite right, so please find information about a forthcoming anthology appearance for him here.)
And now, over to Jason…

Shen wants to eat me.

He’s feeding me again, and this time he’s spooning the honey all over me, all over us. A month ago he started serving me a thick mead, but it’s just honey now, it’s all that I eat and drink.

When I die, he’s going to put me in a box. He’s shown it to me, it’s even got my name on a metal plate and a blank spot where that final date will be engraved. There’s a row of wax-lined clay coffins in his cellar, kept under temperature control. I was jealous of these others at first, but Shen convinced me that I was different, special.

We’re going to have a baby.

He’s careful as we make love, rolling around in the sweet sticky goop. I’m somewhere in my second trimester, but trust me when I say it’s easy to lose time in this house.

Honey. It’s all I can taste, all I can smell. I never used to like the stuff, but now I suck greedily at the spoon, lick it from his skin, stuff my hands into the jar like Winnie the Pooh.

He let me taste one of the others once, a girl called Gwendoline. She died with a smile on her face in 1908. He cracked open the wax seal, pushed the lid to one side. She was suspended in three feet of honey, her flesh withered and crystallised. The smell was something between honey and a strong fortified wine.

‘Try,’ he said gently, and I snapped off her little toe. Without hesitation I put it into my mouth, and there it rested like the Host itself, melting and suffusing my mouth with immortality and joy.

‘Enough,’ Shen told me. ‘Any more and you’ll hurt the baby.’

One day soon I will stop moving, and as my organs all begin to shut down he will gently place me into my coffin. Shen will kiss my forehead, rub my bulging tummy, and begin to pour in the honey. I’m torn that I’ll never get to hold our baby, but when he eats his way out of my womb in a hundred years time, he will have the same golden-brown skin that his daddy has, and the same prospects.

Then father and son will eat me together, our first and only meal as a family.

THE END