Last night, I dreamed of a blue apple.

I held it up before me, and it was all I could see; I had some sense of where I was -- it was raining -- but everything was in swirls and blurs, and I was unable to discern exactly; it remained in perfect focus. Under my grasp, it felt firm and hard; the skin, flawlessly smooth but uneven in colour, streaks, veins and knots, like the grain of wood. It had a unnatural, exaggerated shape, with high, full arches like a Valentine heart or a woman's pelvic bone.

It was a caricature of nature, almost grotesquely beautiful -- Blue Delicious. I didn't taste it, didn't dare bite into it in a crude physical violation, mashing its pale flesh with my tongue, contaminating its tartly sweet juices with my saliva, catching slivers of cobalt skin between my teeth ... only looking, and breathing in the air around it.