Perfectly Whole

This story came from noticing the strange emotional power of the foods we associate with comfort, nostalgia, and care.

There’s something deeply trusting about the act of eating. We allow things into our bodies believing they will nourish us, heal us, sustain us, or bring us pleasure. And strawberries, especially in Michigan, carry an almost innocent cultural symbolism: roadside stands, summer fields, homemade shortcake, church socials, jam cooling in the kitchen. They feel wholesome before we even taste them.

That word kept returning to me while I was writing: wholesome.

I became interested in the horror hidden inside that assumption. What happens when something beautiful and good for you becomes dangerous? What happens when desire quietly crosses the line into hunger, and hunger becomes dependency?

The roadside fruit stand in this story grew from memories of traveling rural roads where small produce tables appear almost suddenly at crossroads — baskets of berries under tin roofs, handwritten signs, coffee cans for payment, nobody watching. There is something both charming and slightly uncanny about them, especially late in the evening when the roads are empty and the fields go dark around them.

Arthur also became important to me because I didn’t want the story to be about greed in the ordinary sense. His hunger is more human than that. He wants memory, vitality, clarity, connection to the life that is slowly slipping away from him. Aging itself can begin to feel like a series of small disappearances, and I wanted the strawberries to tempt him — not simply with pleasure, but with restoration.

The deeper horror, for me, was not the supernatural bargain itself. It was the idea of becoming physically whole while emotionally hollowed out — cured of grief, longing, fear, and love at the same time.

I called the story Perfectly Whole because the phrase sounds reassuring, almost old-fashioned and safe. Something printed on a roadside sign or stamped onto a produce label. But beneath it lives the uneasy realization that the things we trust most completely are often the things we allow closest to us without question.