Written 7/18/03

By Cassie Rhodes,

Email-coolgirlchic16@Yahoo.com, please review.

In Captain Barbossa's point of view.

Intoxication

Apples, I remember apples. Crisp, fresh, juicy apples. Like meat after a month eating boiled seaweed. The taste of meat torments me, but not like the apples. They're pure intoxication. Like Jack. He tasted of apples. Green apples, like the ones my Grandmum grew on her land, before I left England.

Jack tastes of apples, but I have said that already. I think I loved him. I only kissed him for a moment. I only held him so intimately for five seconds or less. We were young. We had just found the Black Pearl together. He was captain, because of his skill. I was his second man, I used to be proud of that.

I always had to taste apples after that moment. That moment when he stopped talking in secret with me. That moment when thereafter he chased wenches like they were the last things on Earth. I missed him after, but I drowned myself in the apples. Immersing my tongue in the juice, savoring every spark of their essence.

For a few minutes they would hold me high. But I lost the goodness in me then. Jack was lost to me, and I had tried to lose myself. I succeeded. And now all that obsessed me was gold, I had lost the flavor. So I asked for the location of Isla De Muerta. Trying to remember the love, the apples.

I handed him the pistol, he watched as I loaded it, and hated me as I threw him on that island. But he had been lost long before I handed him that pistol. Soon we had the treasure. And soon I was immortal, and all that mattered was gold. And apples. I would never be rid of them.

Night after night, I would try to kill myself. Night after night, I would eat an apple. Hoping the flavor would seep through the ash that they turned to. Nothing happened.

We got all the gold eventually, and we found Jack. Jack Sparrow, he would never leave me. He just shot me a moment ago. And I saw a life flash before my eyes.

A life of apples and intoxication.

And I could only feel the cold, and smell the apple in my pocket, as my left hand crushed the juice out. Never to reach my lips.

As Jack Sparrow stared.