Don’t eat the blackberries below your bum. Those shiny black clusters of miniature purple balloons dangling in the arc of a dog’s piss? My Auntie T. didn’t put it quite as bluntly as that. But my sandcastle bucket had scant riches.
We elbowed through the bushes, and she advises me, straight off: reach up. Reach up to any glorious sun-ripened juicy freshness and pluck. But not down. They be sullied. I looked at my palms and fingers tattooed with berry ink. I thought, why does Architeuthis, a squidillion miles down, squirt ink invisible in the silent dark? I was Archi spiraling through trenches of verdant raspy stems swinging my tenticulating weapons. Hi ya!
Don’t eat the blackberries below your bum. They are stinky anyway and you will notice immediately before you pop one in your mouth; the metallic tang, the acid clang, or the aroma shards if your steely nose leaps there first. The snags at my meat-red jacket will tug me alert. I look at my bucket swinging in my grip and the plasticky certainty of the slim handle and invisibly embossed sun-illuminated vermillion castles. The clop of destrier hooves on granite cobbles. I know my berry numbers could be swollen after I look downways and a glint from something half-buried at my feet glances the profile of one particularly large and fruity target close to the threshold of dog pissy-ness and irresistibly drawing my plucking fingers. I need to test my Auntie T’s directive. Because I’m fond of tickling dog ears.
Don’t eat the blackberries below your bum. Well I pulled one, didn’t I, in defiance. It was fat and dark and silent and promised deliciousness and mysteriousness, and I didn’t even put it in my bucket meant for sandcastle sand or snorting horses, nor did I stomp forth in my rainbow boots, a gift last birthday from her. I risked it. I plucked the berry. I squeezed it between my little eight-year-old incisors and the flavours busted out in a sweet flood across my tongue. A drench. That blackberry drenched my taste dimensions. But so did the acid map of maturing dog piss.
I ruminated on blackberry sweetness and tarty overtones. Massive. Then galloped through the bushes plucking the blackberries below my bum.
