Skullduggery [FICTOID]

“Anyone who eats this papaya,” said the witch doctor, “will turn into a skull.”

“Is it poisoned?” the explorer asked.

“No.”

“Cursed, then?  I don't believe in curses.  Too rational, don'tcha know.”

“I could teach you a thing or two about curses that would make your scrotum crawl up to hide between your kidneys, but no, not cursed.”

“Radioactive?”

“Come on, man!  We're in the middle of the Guatemalan jungle!  You see any nuclear reactors or atomic bomb test sites around here?”

“Well, somebody could be illegally dumping nuclear waste…”

“No, not radioactive.”

“Infected? Bacteria, fungus, virus, parasites, whatever?”

“You're not even warm.”

“What then?  It looks like a perfectly ordinary papaya.”

“It is a perfectly ordinary papaya –- well, not perfect.  See, there's a little bruise on it.”

“Aha! The bruise!”  

“Just a bruise. Nothing extraordinary about it.”

The explorer sighed. “All right, I give.  Why will the papaya turn anyone on earth who eats it into a skull?”

“Because all of us shall die someday, my friend.”

The explorer looked impassively at the witch doctor for several long moments then said, “That is the stupidest answer I've ever heard.”

“No, it works,” said the witch doctor.  “Everyone dies sooner or later, and when they do, they decompose into a skeleton.”

“What if they’re cremated?  Ha!  Didn't think of that one, did you?”

“At some point in the procedure the skin is burned off, leaving a skull.”

“But the papaya doesn't cause that to happen.”

“Never said it did,” said the witch doctor.

“But you created that impression.”

“Did I?  Or did you assume I meant that?”

“We're getting into epistemological territory here,” said the explorer.

“You see any philosophical infants crawling around?”

© Buzz Dixon