“Get your Palm fruit here! Cheapest anywhere on earth!”

Gus drooled, nearly everyday he’d bought fruit from the central market, and had tried to get a new kind everyday. In the winter he’d been addicted to blood oranges, and they were out of season now in the late spring, so hearing the shout of new fruits made his heart race. Yet his normal salesman wasn’t there with his tent. Instead there was an enthusiastic Caribbean man where his stall usually was. Figuring the elderly vendor got up late and had parked further down; Gus wandered past the other vendors of leather and tourist-goods.

After walking further down the via, he looped back to the first vendor hollering in many languages about his wonderful fruit selection. The man had one left, and with a profoundly animated display of gestures and wordplay entreated Gus to buy it. Feeling a strange mix of curiosity and pity, he handed him the coin, thanked him for the fruit and walked off with it. The man called out, “Eat that quickly now and don’t share it!” Slightly shaken Gus turned around and looked back at the man’s stall. Both were gone.

Walking for a little bit with the fruit in his hands he came to the outskirts of the city walls, and plopped down on a bench. He bit into the palm fruit and devoured it in a number of minutes. The flavors were intense- and different. As the initial shock of the taste wore off it was replaced by a second powerful aftertaste. The feeling was like a truck smashing into his face.

Gus instinctively reached up to the affected area of his nose and mouth- expecting a red tide. Instead he only felt a bump. On his nose he could feel the bump swelling, taking on an incredibly tough consistency like bone- and it began to curve? His legs too ached from the impact, below the knees he felt his skin becoming numb, and before too long he barely feel his toes, masking a dull pain.

Above the knees to Gus’s torso he felt a prickle and a discomfort that shot like wildfire all around his abdomen to his back and shoulders. His toes were harder and harder to distinguish as he looked down, and he thought he saw claws growing, but he tried to write it off as part of his delirium. This whole thing was obviously a dream he needed to wake from.

The same pain flowed into his lower jaw, accompanied again by the unreal swelling and the texture of bone. As this happened, he noticed a black blur coming right form him as he moved his left hand to check his aching mouth. As he looked around he saw nothing, but the landscape getting hazy as the pain reached his head. He was hot everywhere- and itchy.

Wiping the sweat of his forehead with his right hand Gus saw the black blur again, and to his horror saw it was coming from his arm! Black feathers had sprouted all along his arm from his shoulder to his fingers. His fingers were entirely engulfed by the feathers; they had already covered his back, and both shoulders. Now the black tide spread across his chest and back as he watched helplessly.

The pain in his mouth intensified as his skull rearranged. The front of his face lurched forward and the bumps he felt on his jaws were the developing stages of a large beak. The growth shot out taking a yellowish-orange consistency and terminating in a black spade shape. His shock was expressed in the call of a bird which made sense as the feathers exploded in a tail appendage from his backside.

As his beak grew to completion, feathers covered his body, black over his back and arms, and yellow on his face and chest. His greatly discolored legs terminated in fully prehensile and powerful three-clawed talons. He was still roughly the size of a man, albeit taller with the plumage of a bird and a great clunky mix of both features. Was this the fruit’s doing? How could he get back to normal? As these thoughts rushed through Gus’s brain, he looked at his wings and felt the breeze. It called to him.

“Can I fly?” Gus croaked, his voice similar but uncomfortably different in his strange mouth. He felt like he already new the answer, flapping his wings, and soon he was in the air.
“Maybe this isn’t so bad” He mused as the thermals guided his body skyward.”

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Good news everyone, I found a scanner.

Been a few weeks I know, but I did manage to find a scanner at the newer of the school’s buildings here in Florence, and I have no classes there, else I would have found it sooner. They’re very small, scan too brightly and only really accommodate European paper sizes, so any thing that looks too screwy I’ll rescan again stateside.

Now while this thing looks extremely random, it isn’t entirely. Toucans are fairly out of place in Italy, yes ? For the first couple days I could relate. My Italian’s not great, and when shopkeepers get excited and start whipping’ out long phrases I’m usually left in the dust. As for why I choose this bird particularly, I think it’s because I heard the angry bird toucan too many times from someone’s ipod.

This is also a different technique than I normally use, I actually haven’t colored this way since middle school. I drew very lightly in graphite, then erased the entire thing piecemeal as I put the under layer down. No ink, no scanning and reprinting. Other than that, its still colored pencil, but instead of Crayola’s it’s prismacolor.

I’ve never eaten a palm fruit and until recently didn’t know if they were edible.

Image is © me  ageaus