KILLER FRUIT

Flashback to three days earlier, a Friday night. My absolute favorite night of the week, and I was practicing my favorite pastime: playing my TrollQuest video game with a bag of corn chips balanced on my knee for easy snack-cess. I’m pretty good at it.

Georgia was out doing little-sister stuff somewhere with her little-sister friends, and Mom had the night off from work, so she was making something tasty-smelling in the kitchen. I settled into the cushions, put my feet up, and switched on the TV.

“Doesn’t get much better than this, hmm, Leo?” I shoveled another fistful of Tastee Taco Shells into my mouth as I heaved a boulder onto some troll-eating maggots. Leo didn’t say anything. He had a mouthful of Tastee Taco Shells. Plus, he’s not real.

These days he mostly sticks to showing up in my drawings. I mean, it’s not like I’m completely nuts. Not yet, anyway.

After I finished my TrollQuest level, I flipped on a Discovery Channel special about—you guessed it—Australia. It was great. Apparently, everything in Australia is dangerous. Everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything everything.

Even the flowers are toxic. Flowers.

There’s a fruit that tastes like paradise but contains vicious barbed hooks that latch on to the soft part of your throat, causing you to die. HOOKS! What possible reason could there be for a tasty fruit to contain killer throat hooks?

And the Irukandji, the world’s most venomous jellyfish, lives in Australia. The thing looks like an evil, transparent gummy bear.

They have birds that could kill you.

Why would a giant bird need claws? It makes no sense. The cassowary can’t even fly. It has these little stunted wings. Wouldn’t it have been a better idea for the cassowaries to grow some actual wings and leave the claws and sprinting to the cheetahs?

Creature after creature rolled on-screen, each of them even more fearsome, more bloodthirsty, or just plain weirder than the last. Crocodiles as big as school buses, Tasmanian devils (don’t ask), goannas (basically dinosaurs), ghost bats (of course), stonefish (deadly fish sneakily disguised as stones), poisonous blue-ringed octopuses (cute little octopuses that are possibly the most poisonous creatures on the planet), venomous snakes by the bucketload, redback spiders, scorpions, stick insects (so big they should be called log insects), killer caterpillars (caterpillars!), toadfish (with teeth shaped like a parrot’s beak that are capable of ripping off your toe)… and sharks.

Lots and lots and lots of sharks. Tiger sharks, bull sharks, makos, hammerheads, blues, and the big daddy of them all—the shark that gives me nightmares—the great white.

Nothing on earth could have ever persuaded me to set foot in Australia.

“They have sharks in America, too, dummy,” Leo said.

“Not in Hills Village, they don’t,” I replied.

It was like the whole ecosystem had been designed by a complete nutzoid with a really twisted sense of humor. As far as I could tell, Australia was basically an island full of monsters.

“Man, that is one scary place!” I muttered, and switched the channel to something more soothing—a show about a friendly neighborhood serial killer.