bananas

Okay, so this is very light, and fun to write. You can't expect something dark and morose with "Bananas" as a topic. Or if you think you can, good luck writing it!

Maria had not talked to her flat-mate for three months, and she did not plan on doing so for a long time yet.

It began when he went into her studio without her permission, and ate one of her models, and from then onwards their friendship, such as it had ever been, had escalated into an outright war. If she had wanted to she could have seen it from his point of view: After all, you walk into a room, feel hungry, see a bowl of fruit... But, as is often the case when you are annoyed with someone, seeing it from his perspective was not something she wanted to do.

The bananas had been her favorite part. She had applied wash after wash of paint, building up the colours in a painstakingly slow fashion, towards a goal she was sure would have been so vibrant, so perfect, that it would have done that which she had been striving for years to achieve, that is, in her own words, to “put the ‘Life’ back into Still-Life.” She had the perfect title for the piece, too:

“Tropical fantasy held in a wooden bowl.”

None of that boring “bowl of fruit on a table” nonsense. That belonged to the age of the old masters. No, she was a new artist! New ways of going about the same idea! Modern art in an old form!

But now Pedro had eaten one of her precious bananas, and all her ambitions and desires had plunged down the drain. How could fate have been so heartless? She felt as if the fire of her artistic passions had been douse, and now all that remained were pitiful wisps of steam.

She would never speak to him again. Of that much, she was certain.

She sighed, and glanced over yet again at her beautiful, ruined painting. The voluptuous purple grapes, the dimple skinned oranges, the spiny golden pineapples, and. She could hardly bear to look, the pale, crescent-moon shapes of her never to be completed bananas. Why, Pedro may as well have bombed the Eiffel Tower, or trampled Van Goph’s Sunflowers, for all the desecration he had committed. 

There was a tentative knock on the studio door.

“Maria?” came That Man’s voice through the wood, “Can I come in?”

She did not deign to reply. He was below her, and thus did not deserve the faintest grunt of acknowledgement. 

The door creaked slowly open. Maria rounded on him. How she would berate him! Flood him with such a tide of anger and hatred that he would be left a quivering, emotional mess on the floor!

He grinned sheepishly, and held out a box wrapped in gift paper. How dare he try to placate her so obviously!

She snatched it away from him, and tore the paper off in such a way that showed she cared nothing for its contents. She would throw whatever it was in his face.

She opened the box, and paused, hand quivering. Inside lay a long, perfect banana, and a tube of yellow paint.

Maria looked up at Pedro, and down at the box, then at Pedro again. She took up the piece of fruit, and turned towards the bowl she had used as her model. She arranged the banana carefully within, and stood back to look at it. Perfection.

Pedro was watching her in the was you might look at a bomb after having cut a wire, unsure as to whether you’d defused it or simply shortened the time until explosion. He looked so comical that she began to laugh. He joined in, cautiously at first, and then they both lapsed into hysteria, tears- of laughter or sadness? - Running down their faces.

And so ended the Great Banana War, in tears and laughter. Wouldn’t it be nice if our bomb wars ended the same way?