Taste No Evil

The Prompt:

The title gives it away, no?  Continuing to explore the senses through our writing, today’s prompt (page 16 of Room to Write) is about describing what surrounds us through our sense of taste.

Response:

Just took a sip of water, which tasted of cool, filtered nothing until leaving a plastic aftertaste at the tip of my tongue.  If I licked this crystal water goblet, it might taste of my bland lip balm caked at its rim.  If I ran my tongue along the smooth glassy surface of this desk, it might taste of bitter dust with a hint of metallic at the edges.  If I stuffed my sock monkey that sits on the desk into my mouth, its dry fibers might have a dried oatmeal, shredded wheat quality, much like the linen-covered journal resting beside it, though the latter might have an added hint of salt or chemical from its black dye.  The napkin in front of my keyboard would dissolve on my tongue almost too quickly to detect an unexpected sweetness of bran.  As I gaze through a pane of glass at the potted plants on the window sill, I imagine snapping into their thick, rubbery leaves to yield a moist burst of lettuce and aloe, crisp and awakening on the tongue and almost slightly acidic like citrus fruit.  As I further pretend to mash my face down into the soil, I taste the gritty mineral-rich dirt and strain in trying to swallow down the rusted-penny tinged taste of dried and brittle clay.  Looking further on to the leafless branches across the road, I sink my teeth in and snap off a twig to savor its dirt-peppered smoky oakiness that slides into the somewhat salted juices of my saliva (the taste-buds of which are still saturated with the essence of chili pepper and coconut curry) as I gnaw on its end.

Reflection:

And I think that’s where I’ll conclude, as I’ve developed a weird hunch that a lot of things within my field of vision right now might end up tasting alike—though definitely not like chicken, as everything else seems to :). I wanted to resist reflecting on any of the meals I had today to avoid describing actual food that would make sense being in my mouth, though that potency of my literal taste clearly began to influence my imagined ones.  What a challenge, though!  This was a real effort in concentration, clearing my mind of everything but that object and dissecting it for its “ingredients” so that when I vividly envisioned rolling it around on my tongue those flavors would come forth…even then, however, when I really felt I had locked in my mind what it would taste like, the tricky part was to articulate that in words.  As I mentioned in my previous post, taste and smell are what I find to be  the most difficult to convey as sensory details in writing, so, again, I find this will be a useful exercise to return to with frequency.

Hmm…a world in which you could taste everything?  What might that be like…