Berry

I closed my mouth slowly, deliberately, pressing rather than chewing. It is important to savour. The berry, plucked so long ago from that solitary bush, kept too long in my tattered pouch, was engulfed in my parched silence. It was shrivelled, hard; my tongue pushed it to the roof of my mouth, my throat braced for a burst of sweet juice that never came.

A rare breeze from the west caught me off guard; I gasped. I let the berry drop, let it tumble in the vacuous cavern of my mouth like a grain of sand in the wind, felt it roll across the camber of my tongue. It came to rest by the teeth scaffolding my sunken cheeks and in that moment, with my faculties addled by the brief reprieve from the stifling heat, I had not the focus nor the restraint (nor, in truth, the desire) to stop my tongue lifting the berry atop that bottom row of cracked molars. Instinctively, my jaw closed and the taste of the berry's nectar flooded my senses, and I was chewing for the briefest moment — my teeth screamed, unaccustomed as they were to the sweetness — and then I swallowed, greedily, and it was over.

Twelve days I had carried that berry. I could not scold myself, for I am only human, and for better or worse my throat was now thinly lubricated and I would not waste that membrane on something so trifling as reproach. Perhaps that gives me too much credit. Inwardly I seethed, thought curses loudly at my loathsome self, but I had already tested my luck with a gasp; I dared not break the silence again. That gasp had ruined enough, had nearly ruined it all.

The berry had been planned, in my mind, as a celebration. I had succumbed — or relented — to its consumption with nary a success to celebrate because I believed, or had convinced myself, that it would give me energy.

A berry. How stupid.

I was often stupid. The heat of twenty-fifth century England does that to a person. It addles the mind, melts the senses. Objectively, if not relatively. I was stupid, but no stupider, and no smarter, than anyone else I knew.

I knew nobody else, for I was the last person left alive. That may not be true, but it may as well have been.

These thoughts did not pass through my head at the time. Such flights of fancy, such departures from the here and now, could no longer be justified. Not without my berry, which represented, both figuratively and literally, everything I had in the world. I had snuffed out that berry and now I would snuff out something bigger, lest I be snuffed myself.

The long-dead sycamore offered my only solace. My only shade. Through its petrified limbs, I watched the squirrel. Was it a squirrel? The heat radiating from the sunbaked ground distorted the little creature, made it hard to tell. It didn't help that the thing was so skinny. Looking at my skeletal hand gripping the bones of the tree, my twig-like fingers, my arm of hardened tendon and little else, I absently noticed I didn't have a leg to stand on. Best not to look at my legs. The sight of them only sapped confidence from what they had to do next. My eyes, heavy and dry, strained to focus on the squirrel. It was a morsel, but bigger than a berry.

Lethargic — the squirrel and myself — an even match.

I had longer legs. It had keener ears, and the advantage of another arboreal corpse under which it languished. If it scaled the tree, this pursuit would be over. I didn't have another one in me, not without the promise of that berry, not without the safety blanket it offered. The safety of sustenance for a few more hours, enough to track down another squirrel to sustain me for a few more days, enough to find another miraculous bush of berries against all the odds. Perhaps that last was always a pipe dream. But I had found one such bush; why not more?

This thought did pass through my mind. Not at the time, but many times prior. Ever since finding that first bush.

A bush! I remember thinking that. Such excitement sparked from a shrub. It's a wonder those before me ever let them all perish. Well, evidently not all of them, but still. I can hardly imagine having a land full of them. They had parks whose purpose was nothing more than to let bushes and trees — full trees, mind you — flourish and propagate. Let them, as if the sun didn't beat them into submission and boil their innards at first light.

My excitement for the bush came even before I crept close enough to see the purple accoutrements accenting the verdant green of its innocuous round leaves. Those berries could have killed me, on reflection, but it was a price I was willing to pay. A fair trade at twice the price, and I hungrily took the gamble.

The first berry popped in my mouth. Food and water in a single bite — could there be a greater reward for courage? Yes: a second berry. A third. Dare I say it? A fourth. I ate them quickly, no illusions of pressing them to the roof of my mouth, no facade of savouring. I stole thirty-four berries from that bush — all it had to offer — and I ate twenty-two that very day.

What a day.

The best days of my life are, in order:

1) Losing my virginity willingly, offset shortly thereafter by almost losing my life unwillingly. Same guy.

1, again) The birth of my daughter, offset by the six excruciating days of her inevitable starvation.

1, thrice) Twenty-two berries in my mouth and in my throat and stomach.

Thinking back, I was too hasty. That bush could have sustained me for weeks, would have replenished itself in time. I could have studied it, found a means of propagating another. But I ransacked it, pillaged its resources and squandered them in the name of wanton short-term hedonism.

Reminds me of a book I read once. A history book that read like a horror. One of those that has you questioning your own sanity because the Big Bad is so adamant that it is not the Big Bad.

I was under no illusions that I was any different from those that preceded me. Those who hungered not for the taste of the berry but for the wealth that it would bring, and that hunger was insatiable. Perhaps they were worse; they saw a berry and took the bush. But it's all relative. What they did for profit (such an abstract concept in this world of sand and dust) I do for a brief burst of meagre juice.

I saw the error of my ways, in the end. In truth I saw my error as it was happening, at around berry number three, but I pretended to myself that I didn't. It was a problem for future me, who, as it happens, is present me. Did the humans of yesteryear acknowledge their errors as they made them? Did they wave hello as they sped past? Perhaps they, too, saw it as a problem for future them. Who, as it happens, is present me.

My history book suggests they did. Suggests they pretended for a long time much like me, suggests they even tried to rectify the centuries-long error. Alas, you can vomit up a berry, but you can't put it back on the bush.

It's hard not to laugh when learning of their last-ditch effort, even though, all things considered, the joke is on me. They tried to take the stuff out of the air. Succeeded, too. They mastered the technology, and that was the problem. They thought they could pull it out quicker than they could pump it in, so it became a free for all. They relaxed. Stopped thinking of alternatives.

They just horribly misjudged it.

By the time they realised their error, the damage was done. All they could do while the planet boiled was watch and wait and die.

Anyway. I looked at the squirrel. Squinted, trying to see if it saw me, too. I looked at the tree. Needed to dissuade the squirrel from scurrying up it. Next to me was a stick, petrified and weighty. I hefted it from the ground and took a deep breath. Then, slowly, silently, I crept towards the squirrel.

It didn't move as I approached. Did it see me? Did it matter? As I closed the distance, its avenue of escape narrowed. It would have to run at me or up the tree, and I would make the former seem preferable. I stopped, as close as I dared get. Then I threw the stick with all my might.

My aim was good: it hit the trunk of the tree with a clatter, and the noise cut through the starved silence. The squirrel was startled, and it bolted from underneath the tree towards my hungry open arms. But only for a moment.

I had misjudged it.

I realised this as it hopped down a rabbit hole dug deep into the hard earth and I watched its long rabbit-ears disappear into the ground. My heart broke in that moment. The rabbit may just as well have vanished into the thin, hot air.

I cursed my treacherous eyes and slapped the impenetrable clay as if to scold it for betraying me so. The sound of my slap was the last I would hear. I had not the strength for more. I had not the tears to cry. I would wait here, bereft of berry and bush, in the meagre shade of the tree, for a rabbit that would not come, or a death that would. I felt it in my bones. I felt it on another mocking breeze. Engulfed in the desert's parched silence, I was nothing but another grain of sand in the wind.