The hikers stop meandering and rest in a secluded cove. Oblivious to the doom that stalks their steps. As of right now, they’re four hours into the wilderness; isolation wraps around them like a shroud, muffling possible shrieks and screams. They now eat in silence, but this fragile peace breaks when a girl named Raisinée joins the eatery by unveiling a bag containing grapes that had been stabbed on a skewer.
Our social contract began to splinter when Raisinée empties the bag in front of us, dropping the skewers into her hand.
Many of the hikers, outraged at her shamelessness, contain their breath. A column of smoke comes out of Don’s left ear as the outrage boils his brain cells. The others, equally disconcerted and speechless, hold on to their walking stick as a crucifix approximation. I also suppress my outrage, wrestle with the moral weight of Raisinée’s brazenness, and end up breaking the silence.
“Are those grapes?” My question is a formality, a fact-finding mission, a last shred of hope for this absurdity to have a rational explanation (perhaps the grapes are a bizarre new cosmetic I wasn’t aware of).
“Yes, you want some?” The question hangs in the air, both a challenge and an invitation, daring me to cross an unspoken line and trample the threads holding us together.
Before I can process it, Nick the hiker on my left, his face covered in sweat, repeatedly punches a tree. He says under his breath: “You have committed an atrocity against nature and stabbed the very heart of decency.”
“I mean I like it, it keeps it organised.”
“No. This is a manifesto of chaos. You have pierced what was already whole.”
I intervene again: “What disorganisation does this preserve you from? You assassinated individual grapes just so they wouldn’t roll around in a plastic bag?”
“no it took me like a minute, and I like it.”
“How can you possibly support the impalement of fruit?!” Nick screamed.
“i’ve seen this in several other places, i’m not the only one”
“You’ve not just stabbed those grapes—you’ve stabbed the very heart of our civilisation, Raisinée!”
“ok so you don’t want a grape”
“Grapes are already an emblem of elegance, they need no help to be perfect. They are evolutionarily designed to efficiently cluster. Yet they have here been speared and strung, stripped of their autonomy, transformed into the trophy of an artificial order that only a fool or a tyrant could ask for.”
“That’s exactly it; the skewer is an instrument of control masquerading as efficiency. It screams of excess effort for minimal gain, an abominable rebellion against the natural state of things.”
But am I not taking the raw, chaotic beauty of human spontaneity – her inexplicable choice to stab grapes into skewers – and impaling it on the skewer of my own need for sense? My outrage, my pseudo-philosophical posturing, is nothing more than another fruitless attempt to impose order where none is needed or even possible.
Grapes cluster, but they also fall apart. Their skins wrinkle into raisins; they deteriorate under the weight of time or touch. The natural state of things is chaos. Chaos is not just the state of grapes; it is the state of existence itself. Skewered grapes are no more an affront to the natural order than the hiking trail we have carved through the wilderness, than the words I use to trap thoughts into neat little sentences.
Desirée spoke: “to resist my skewers is to resist the fundamental truth of being: that everything, eventually, is pierced by something. Time pierces the present. Death pierces life. Understanding pierces ignorance, only to collapse into further ignorance. And here you are, trying to pretend you aren’t holding a skewer of your own.”
Our outrage isn’t righteous; it is ridiculous. To debate the skewering of grapes is to skewer grapes anew, to turn the act itself into a symbol it had never sought to be. I thought I was fighting for chaos against the tyranny of the skewer, but I have only ever been skewering the chaos in myself, trying to pin it down so it won’t overwhelm me. She is simply a node in the swirling chaos, no more or less absurd than any of us on this hike.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but individual grapes stabbed on a stick will destabilise reality. “We skewered the grapes because we’re terrified of them rolling away,” Nick muttered. “We planned this hike to feel in control of something wild.”
Storm clouds gathered over our heads and it started pissing down.
