Short stories: Fables
by Janet Grischy
It's not commonly known, but tomatoes were once poisonous. Not only that, but they were once small, hard, and black, or, more precisely, a downy dark violet. Tomatoes were carefully bred to be the beautiful juicy red fruit they are today. And they haven't poisoned anyone for centuries.
But why, you may wonder, were tomatoes bred to their present luscious state? No one tenderizes the nettle, or converts the spiky star thistle to a soft easeful mat beside our stepping stones.
Tomatoes, as it happens, have always had certain properties. You may have heard them called love apples. This is why the tomato was used, and its gelid seeds dried and saved: out of love for the people, and care for their guidance. It turns out, when mixed in true proportion with karae (the formula is lost), under the correct phase of the moon (the ancient calendar of days is gone), it was the love apple that permitted the priestess to prophesy.
There were challenges, and they were met in the ancient ways. The love apples must be gathered by a soft skinned virgin. And his thumbs would turn a purple-black and he must give up the company of womankind. The dark love apples grew so small and scant upon the ground that the sacred fields must spread wide, and the juice of fallen love apples poisoned the very soil, so that nothing useful would grow, around the plants or anywhere down to the nearest river.
Caree too (as they came to call it), must be traded for, and the true crops of the people must go far away to buy it. And the quest for truth was perilous, and some of the sisters died in prophecy.
It came to the sister Oma, in the dark spell, that change must come to the people. The people must bring a new way to the sacred fields. She was a priestess of deep power, and her view prevailed among the councilors. They bred the sacred love apples out to the insipid white ground-fruit of the scrubland that the mare-cattle fed upon, and the crops were failures. There was no truth in those first hybrids, and stronger was their poison. Again priestesses died.
They tried again, and bred a little closer to the true line. Still they mixed with care. And when Oma was gone, and Tama her daughter, and her daughter's daughter's daughter, they held a tomato whose poison had all gone into the leaves.
Only then did they see what they had done, what lost Oma had guided them to. They were smack among the modern world, prophecy gone, magic dead, with only vivid love and tempering care to guide them. For love still needs care.
And still, just before the green tomato begins to redden, you'll see that faint tone of white under the skin, that recalls what this love apple once was. And still, if a tomato hangs too long in the warmth of late summer, when you cut it open you'll see a deep purple shadow among the scarlet seed and flesh. Raising it to your nose you'll smell the secret musk in its heart, and you'll know, the tomato once was poison.