A Traveling Alchemist Notices You

"I want YOU--," he shouts, his fingers pointing to the spot between my eyes ,"...to imagine an apple." A huge toothy smile materializes over a few seconds, and he continues...

Imagine a red apple, crimson and dark-red glorious. You'll need to close your eyes for this. I do.

Now, now imagine it rotting... but very, very slowly. I want you to imagine HOW an apple rots, child. What does it look like from its glorious peak to its initial spongy slump. The reduction of water that evaporates through it.

Imagine the apple, and the crimson, and the evaporation... all the while the apple exists through all the days it exists as an apple growing ever so smaller. Do you see? I think so.

His tone shifts; more instructive, now. It's important that we imagine these things as a whole, and not in pieces. The apple should exist in each moment of your mind and not disappear. The apple is not the pores on the surface of the apple where the evaporation is taking place, but both the whole apple including the pores, the evaporation, and the apple's existence in time over the course of its being.

Did you see the rot forming? The evaporation leads you to the underside of the apple. It's in a bowl, maybe; yes, imagine that the apple is in a bowl and the evaporation of water is evaporating but where the apple touches the bowl the evaporation cannot escape because there is no air there. Imagine the apple, crimson, evaporating to spongy texture, growing smaller, in a bowl where the little atmosphere of evaporation is glowing around it like a shining haze, but the haze is pooling near the bowl and cannot get away.

The apple's skin cannot pump out more water and cannot evaporate more against the bowl. And then the brown forms. And if you just imagine the brown, you've lost the apple. The apple is not the brown, it is the apple, the skin, the evaporation, the pooling water in the air, the cannot get away, and the brown.

Now imagine the smell of an apple, what does it smell like in the center...? ...or a quarter of the way through? How does the smell change as the apple rots? How does the smell change in the cannot get away? Imagine the apple crimson evaporating smell as the brown spot forms near the cannot get away. Taste the sugar-brown scent with your mind, but do not just taste, child.

Imagine the brown spot growing, now, yet with greater intensity, but do not drop the texture, the evaporating; while the brown grows and that side turns flat as the pooling cannot get away stops pooling in the air and starts sliming on the bowl. But the slime is not the apple.

Imagine the bacteria that lived in the apple now eating the sugar slick slime in the cannot get away. The bacteria make a smell and a sight and they are not separate from the spongy slump or the dark-red glory. Imagine the skin so tight and sharp against the teeth; the crack smack of taste bud tang and the low crucible of bitterness that grinds away underneath... I make a noise as I try harder. Imagine it and hold it all, if you can, because you must, you must, you MUST, child.

His voice is frenetic, focused; I hear it ringing through me. Imagine the first cauliflower bud of mold against the slicky slime side of the dark-red glorious and the evaporating stench of the cannot get away. Imagine the slackish skin dull sheen sag of the underside brown where apple is eating itself again and growing from itself anew, changing. Imagine the apple dissolving into the bowl, the bowl of nameless shapeless substance and will, where the apple and each piece together are held in a moment encapsulating time and space toward each end and each beginning; the apple cycling from bulbous growth and supple green to black mud. Back to bulging rampant from soon laden stem like bread rising at 15 times regular speed. Twisting into its maturest form, with its chins and oil-face sheen and naive seedy insides.

Imagine now not the hand that grabs it, or the forces that hold it, but the crimson red, the evaporating stench, the cauliflower eye watching, the apple eating itself into change... and if you can just pull... all... that... together-- I hear a new tension in his voice, suddenly.
at--
once--

*CLAP* My eyes shoot open.

...to find that I am holding up an apple.

Then the Alchemist, hands still flat together, smiles broadly and ever-so-slowly pulls his hands apart. Within them sits a golden-brown, perfectly ripened pear.

Which I do not understand. But when he offers me the fruit, I instead take his hand.