Ch. 1: White and One
The wizened old man who sold me the small glass jar filled with what looked like white seeds was evasive as to what the seeds were for, despite the fact that it had "SPANISH SEED" written on it in spidery script over a label made out of sticky tape.
"Help you with everything," he said, peering out from behind a tiny stall in the huge, bustling open market in the city. "Everything." He leered at me, toothlessly. There was a twinkle in his eye. "But there are three rules."
"What are they?" I asked, only half-listening, pawing at the sickly looking lettuce at the front of his display, which was the best of a poor assortment.
"You must take this one first, without chewing," he said, holding up a grimy plastic pocket containing a large black seed. "White ones don't work if you don't take black one, see? Mmm." He waggled the packet at me in his gnarled hand, which could have been part of his sales pitch or just arthritis.
"Don't work, what do you mean?" I was getting bored and hungry.
"Second rule," said the old man, ignoring my question, "is you mustn't eat the white ones yourself, no no no. Have to keep those for the ladies, heh heh heh. Or the boys if that is what you like, hmm?" The vendor roared with laughter, or tried to, before quickly developing a coughing fit. After producing a filthy old hanky and expectorating into it with great gusto, the man looked at me, smirking after he saw that he now had my full attention. "Ah, and the third... the third is for when you run out of white ones. The third is... don't eat a second black one."
I was not in the habit of taking the word of random old codgers as gospel, but this man seemed to believe completely in what he was saying. His price was too good to ignore, whatever it was that these seeds did, so I paid him and turned to go.
"You'll thank me later, son," the old man said, crinkling his crackled skin into a grin.
* * *
If this stuff did what the old man hinted that it would – and I certainly knew what he was implying – then I needed a test subject. First of all, though, I needed to swallow the black seed. It didn't look like anything special, it could have been from any plant. Not that I knew much about plants, but then again I was only 20 years old at the time, I didn't know much of anything at all, apart from the journalism course I was doing at the university. Especially not any good reason why I shouldn't have popped that seed into my mouth and swallowed without getting it taken to a lab to be analysed first.
I decided that I should wait a day or two after swallowing the black seed to see if I came down with anything. I didn't. Well, sort of. There was one curious effect: my body started to emit a peculiar aroma which was nothing like the way I usually smelled. Not that it was unpleasant. It wasn't cinnamon, more of an earthy aroma redolent of more exotic spices I only occasionally got a whiff of going past Asian restaurants, but I imagined it was the same sort of effect that an excess of cinnamon has on the body. I remembered the old joke in Star Trek of Klingons smelling like lilac... yeah, that was kind of the effect.
I waited a week, and I still smelled of lilac but was otherwise fit as a fiddle. If that was the worst of it, I thought through the narrow lens of my hormonal mind, then there can't be anything wrong with the white ones either!
The test shouldn't be on someone I knew well, I decided. But how could I get a stranger to swallow a tiny white seed? I couldn't for the life of me think of a valid way for that to happen in my regular life without breaking laws. Looking back on it now, it seems silly I was prepared to discard all sense of societal responsibility in what I was doing, yet I still tried to hold onto a sense of morality. Inexperienced as I was and ill-prepared for the gift I was given, I took to carrying around one of the white seeds in my wallet, prepared for any contingency.
* * *
One of those chances came on a Saturday away from my studies on a cold autumn morning, when one of my neighbours from several doors down saw me washing my car in my driveway and asked me to help her carry a new television into her one-bedroom flat. She introduced herself as Janine, a bubbly, athletic blonde girl with long wavy hair that flowed over her shoulders, She had a strong, aquiline nose and perfect complexion. She was wearing sneakers and tight cotton pants that showed off the curves of her toned legs and ass, with a loose cotton top covering a healthy chest in a tank top that left enough room to display her tight belly. She might have been a couple of years older than me, no more. She was a babe, no question... and way too good for the likes of me.
"Can I offer you a drink?" she asked innocently, after we had puffed and shuffled our way through the installation process for her new plasma. My ears perked up instantly.
