Set your timer to 10 minutes and start writing. Your opening sentence should be "It was a very large bowl of fruit and as I waited I looked at it wondering..."
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It was a very large bowl of fruit and as I waited I looked at it wondering if it could possibly be real, to be placed here so tantalising and ostentatious, brazen yet not brass, the closest most people these days got to fruit. It must be fake. Either that or it was some obscure kind of test, the sort you heard about where the actual interview counted for nothing, just how you responded to the fruit.
ReplyDeleteI continued to stare. The fruit didn't look back, just basked mutely in my admiration and perplexity, giving nothing back. That yellow one was a banana. You could slip on a banana skin, in the old cartoons. Ba-NA-na. I rolled the word around my mouth and tried to imagine the taste, slippery and yellow.
It seemed inefficient, on the whole, as a means of delivering vitamins. As a decoration, short-lived. Yet precious. It wasn't as if fruit grew on trees, these days.
The apricot seed had evidently lodged itself in his throat, for he leapt from his reverie and bent over his chair in a paroxysm of coughing. No sooner had my sister called for assistance, however, than the glutinous congestion shot to the flagstones. Monsieur Lellouche turned on me, his eyes pricked with tears, and clapped his hand on the table. I retrieved the carafe from the trolley and brought it to him on languid steps. My disinterest earned a violent shudder from the teacups. He snatched away the carafe and held it to his lips; his throat rose and fell with ravenous gulps. I resumed my place at the table and picked at the grapes, but before I could peel one Stepmother harrumphed through the open door behind us.
ReplyDeleteIt was a very large bowl of fruit and as I waited I looked at it wondering if she’d ever come back.
ReplyDeleteLate that night, she left slamming the screen door. It bounced back catching my finger in the wooden frame and banging the knob my into my head. I stood there crying. My older brother Chris consoling me.
"She’ll come back. She always does,” he tells me.
But what if she didn’t?
Had we made her that mad?
Her favourite mug lay in pieces in the street. She’d forgotten it on the roof of the Dasher as she backed wrecklessly out of the driveway. It was her favourite. Like the one before. And the one before that. Oh, she’d be even madder. Maybe she wouldn’t come back this time.
Tears streamed down as we sat looked at the painting on black velvet of a bowl of fruit the tenants before us had left leaning against the wall. We’d leave it there too in a couple of days time. If she comes back.