Cthulhu | Elena Mauli Shapiro

YOU GUYS.

So, I was out having dinner with the husband. I noticed a new color among the sweeteners on offer. Amongst the usual pink, blue, and yellow, there was green. I pulled out the green to get a better look at it. It was called SweetLeaf®. It was made from some rainforest plant called Stevia and promised it was all-natural. I thought this was an interesting product, since maybe it didn’t have the icky aftertaste of your usual artificial sweetener. So, I tore the packet open and poured a tiny amount into the palm of my hand to taste. It was perfectly white and ground very fine, more like something you would snort than eat. I licked the powder off my palm.

I don’t remember exactly what followed. Everything went blurry, the world was obliterated, and my husband sat across the table shaking with laughter at my pain. SweetLeaf® was so disgusting that I am pretty sure this is what Hate tastes like. If you put that taste in the water supply, a nationwide bloody civil war would break out within a day over nothing in particular. Seriously. It was so disgusting that it was sublime. I pretty sure that, amidst the excruciating white pain that blinded my entire soul, I saw the face of God.

I will never be the same. I will never untaste this product. Life itself has been destroyed for me. Now it’s just Nazis raping babies to death with the severed penises of slaughtered endangered panda bears. To a Justin Bieber soundtrack. I mean it, all is dead to me now. I’m pretty sure I can never love again.

If Cthulhu ate a bowl full of anuses and then pooped them into your mouth, it would taste just like that. With a hint of anise. Anise anus, that’s what this stuff should be called. It made me reconsider my stance towards the very idea of rainforest. Raze the whole fucking thing, is what I say now.

After my husband stopped laughing at me, I actually talked him into having a little taste of the stuff. He licked some off his hand, and shrugged. “I dunno,” he said, “it just tastes really sweet.”

So, be advised: depending on what your palate is like, SweetLeaf® tastes either like (a) sweetener or (b) Nazi panda baby rape. Roll the dice and let me know how it works out.