Once Bitten

“This is a story of betrayal,” I say to no one in particular as I sit alone in this noir-genre diner I’m fabricating in order to set a mood. My voice is coarse, my eyes distant; I’m chewing a candy cigarette that I keep trying to light as if it’s real. “It’s a story of becoming your own worst enemy. A story of putting some sick-nasty garbage in your own mouth like an infant because you weren’t paying attention.”

I stare blankly at the rain on the window, stifling a shudder.“I’m talking about… the One Bad Bite.”

We’ve all tasted it—the repulsive jolt of dissonant flavor that ruins your favorite foods forever. The undercooked french fry. The mouth-puckering blackberry at peak season. The army of garlic invading a forkful of pasta. The last glass of milk from a carton that maybe smells a little rank even though it shouldn’t be expired yet, so you can’t know for sure unless you taste it. Yes. Wait… maybe not? OK, yeah, that’s super expired.

“You want to hear about my One Bad Bite, eh?” I say, my gaze fixed to the window. You don’t want to hear about it at all, actually, but the waitress just walked off with your credit card. “Well, I’ll tell you. But don’t go pitying me over it; I have only myself to blame.”

It was a decade ago. I had just discovered my love for pistachios—uniquely green, subtly sweet, nestled in a teardrop shell that rips your thumbs up as you crack it open like an angry little Easter egg. What I had not yet discovered was that not all pistachios are wonderful. There is always One Bad Bite lurking in the bag.

So there I was, cracking and snacking away, blissfully unaware that my every bite was a gamble—and I was about to lose. I cracked open an unusually flimsy shell and dumped the contents of one half down the hatch, expecting the sweet, salty crunch I’d spent the last hour enjoying.

This pistachio was not that. It was sour. It was smoky. It was soft.

I immediately recoiled, trying desperately to spit out this rancid thing that now coated my tongue with a noxious powder. And then I did the one thing you should never do with your One Bad Bite: I looked at it. I looked at the other half of the horrid thing I’d just eaten, in complete disbelief that something so awful could ever be a pistachio.

It was a pistachio, all right—one I’m sure was plump and green once upon a time. Now it was a putrid black lump of death, laid to rest in a little shell coffin lined with cobwebs and filth. And on that lump, there was a teeny tiny hole. And living inside that hole, there was… there was…

I never found out what it was. By then, I’d leapt up, green as a pistachio myself, and careened into the kitchen to scrape my taste buds off with a scouring sponge.

I didn’t want to know. I already knew too much.

“I couldn’t stomach a pistachio for six months after that,” I sigh, sending a dejected cloud of candy powder spewing onto the table. “And when I did finally break that seal again, I was a different person. I was—”

You frantically sign your receipt and gun for the exit, but you still heard me call as the doors closed: “—a shell of my former self.”