He had been walking home from school when he stopped to pluck the strange fruit from the tree.
August was giving way to September, gray clouds had begun to gather on the horizon, and Milo's scuffed shoes beat a steady rhythm against the cracked sidewalk.
He hadn't even been particularly hungry - that was the worst part. Maybe if he had been, then he could have justified it to himself later; he could have said that he couldn't be blamed, that it wasn't really his fault, all those terrible things that happened after. He would think this later, though deep down he knew that the reason for it didn't matter.
What mattered was that he ate the fruit.
It was curiosity, more than anything. He had never seen a fruit that color. As he neared the street corner where the old house with its stone-gray wall, he couldn't help but notice the fruit dangling from one of the branches that overhung.
He would have said it was a plum, if he'd had to guess; though it wasn't any color of fruit he'd seen before. Like golden sand with striations of deep rose, a glimmer on the surface that shimmered like a thousand cut diamonds in the waning light. When he reached up to pluck it, no sooner had his fingertips grazed the skin than it had fallen into his hand, ripe as a harvest moon.
It was beautiful - oh, so beautiful, with a smell like orange blossoms wafting with sticky sweetness towards his nose - and he couldn't have resisted then to try it, though he had never been the kind of boy to do so. He was the only son of a cautious mother, one who warned him of the dangers of eating unknown mushrooms or the berries that grew temptingly red around their small brick home.
Yet, still he ate.
He couldn't have described quite how it tasted; something between nectarine and honey, with another flavor that somehow was like spring rain or the richness of color bleeding from the last sunset of summertime. After the first bite of that overwhelming sweetness, he ate like a starved man, licking up every last drop of the syrupy nectar and sucking every bit of flesh from the pit until nothing was left. As soon as he was finished, he felt a moment of wild, nearly panicked desire to have more - in that moment, he would have given anything in his desperation for another taste of the mysterious fruit.
And then the moment passed.
He tossed the pit aside, and the world seemed to return to normal. He went on his way, and with each step the memory of the fruit faded until the recollection of it was nothing more than a pleasant dream he had once had. Maybe he would have continued with his life, and he never would have thought of the strange fruit again. Maybe things would have stayed the same, and none of those terrible, dark things would ever happen -
But unfortunately for Milo, he would take that same path home from school the next day, and all of the terrible things to follow would be unavoidable.