Eat. by Vanessa Ho

In the faerie country, a bite of food is never just a bite of food. Depending on the giver and the eater, the situation of being and even the time of season, a bite of food can be so much more.

You’ll never understand until you’ve had it.

The fairies have tried to translate the experience to me. I’m their most avid questioner. I’ve seen men reeling back into our world with a glaze in their eyes from a mere sip of golden mead, a lilt in their laugh from a brushing of their lips against an enchanted goblet or fork. A bite can send you toppling into the inception of many other different worlds, some of them so dark and deep that not even the faeries themselves dare to delve there. A bite can give you the endurance to live your life an extended five decades, or to bless you with a curse of invisibility for all your days. It can stain your skin with a golden amber glow, visible only in moon- and candle-light. It can stop your heart with the intensity of its otherworldly flavor and transport you back into our world, still and unmoving, corpse to be found on some hillside, already cold.

No one knows their symptoms until they take their chances. My faerie queen, my love, my protectress, at last caved in to my pleas, my demands, my desires.

A single grape, she finally relented. No more. No less.

Eat.

~Angreek87