Indigo Hunger

Arthur first noticed it with the maps. Stacked high in the forgotten archives, their old, brittle paper smelled of dust and time. But the oceans, drawn in a deep, almost indigo ink, gave off something else. A whisper on his tongue. Not a smell, not a memory, but a taste, faint as a phantom limb. He licked his lips, confused. Just old paper, he told himself, the chemical tang of dried ink. Nothing more.

But then it happened again. He was home, nursing a cracked mug of coffee, staring at the chipped blue rim of his old cereal bowl. And there it was, stronger this time. A precise, cold sensation, like holding a fresh coin on his tongue in the dead of winter. It wasn't unpleasant, not exactly, but utterly alien. He rubbed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, trying to scrape it away. It lingered, a dry, mineral blue, like a stone freshly split from a glacier.

Days bled into weeks, and the blue taste became a constant, unwelcome companion. The sky outside his window, a distant police light, the precise shade of blue on a stranger’s scarf – each flickered the metallic chill across his palate. He started avoiding blue. He covered the cereal bowl with a tea towel, bought new, neutral-colored shirts. His world started to shrink, becoming a drab landscape of grays and browns, all in a desperate, futile attempt to escape the growing flavor.

It wasn’t just the taste anymore. A dull ache settled in his jaw, a constant, low thrum beneath his teeth. His skin felt perpetually chilled, even under heavy blankets. He'd wake in the dead of night, mouth bone-dry, the bitter blue taste coating his throat, and he’d cough, feeling like he was trying to dislodge something sharp, something not meant to be there. He started to feel wrong, like his insides were slowly solidifying, turning brittle.

He went to the doctor. 'It feels like… I’m tasting colors, Doctor. Blue, specifically.' The doctor, a harried man named Dr. Evans, jotted notes, ordered blood tests. 'Stress,' he’d said, peering over his spectacles. 'Anxiety can manifest in strange ways.' Arthur’s tests came back clean. 'Perfectly healthy, Arthur.' But Arthur knew he wasn’t. He saw the faint, almost invisible blue filaments in his tap water, in the threads of his own clothes, catching the light like microscopic veins.

He stopped eating much. Everything tasted of blue eventually. A strange craving began to take root, a perverse pull towards the very thing that haunted him. He found himself drawn to the ocean documentaries on TV, letting the vast, deep blue wash over his eyes, feeling the taste intensify until it was a physical pressure behind his eyeballs. He’d stare at the endless expanse, letting the cold, metallic essence fill him, even as a creeping terror settled in his gut. It was like standing on the precipice of a vast, frozen abyss, and leaning into the fall.

One morning, he caught his reflection in the bathroom mirror. His eyes. Not just the irises, which were naturally a pale, washed-out blue, but the whites. A faint, almost imperceptible tracery of something like capillary vessels, but too fine, too precise, too… blue. A network of indigo threads, spreading from the edges, making the whites of his eyes look like cracked porcelain veined with frozen dye. He leaned closer, breathing shallow, a cold dread washing over him.

He touched his tongue, his own flesh, and the taste was there, stronger than ever. It wasn't just in his mouth anymore. It was *from* his mouth. He felt it emanating from within, a slow, silent spread through his bones, his blood, his very being. The cold taste of blue, finally home, settling in. He stood there, watching the deepening indigo in his reflection, a dull hum starting behind his ears, and for the first time, he didn't try to spit it out. He just opened his mouth, and let it take hold.

A deep, profound hunger. A blue hunger. And Arthur, he was the feast.