| Oranges for Three Loves |
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| Fractured Story Telling | |||
| Written by Francis Scudellari | |||
| Tuesday, 24 March 2009 15:41 | |||
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I. To steal away three oranges for love, he was instructed by long-ago’s cackling voices, but over time, words once sharply plucked and sealed in the wide mouth of his boyish memory have grown up vague. So, this night he picks, to stalk the storybook rows of stubby trees that squat smack in the middle of a maze unknown but tender hands pulled straight to hide riddles in their patchwork of endlessly seamed sameness. Aided by a sickle moon’s pointed glances, he hastily harvests the wages of three waxy fruit and when done drops these juicy hopes neatly in a leather pouch, as loosed the feather-leafed branches snap back skyward. II. Home on the next morning’s edge, first love he sights. She has a narrow white face and blush-dabbed features, with a tall swab of swirled scarlet hair that wags a bobbed tongue’s tale as she comes bouncing into view. Striped dawn flows, and tickled he, perhaps too eagerly, reaches into his bag with the lust of hurried hands. An orange, yet under-ripe and unready, he blurts out to her as a wholly careless, green-topped, and unpeeled gift. She takes it and rolls it through her nest of slender tips. The thumbs inspecting its sadly misshaped bits find the bumps and crevices around a knobby stem proof of worthless fruit. Dropping it, she walks on, nose up-turned. III. Twelve days left to his less-than-virtuous devices, he fusses over the second orange. His nails dig in to screw-cut peel its thick rind, and he picks off odd pieces of pith to smooth its newly gleaming surface. These would-be idol hours spent preening could pay off when another amour falls as an acid-yellow figment. She floats down to him from the distant hilltops, with a floppy mop of golden curls and a broad pink brow. Pristine fruit on palm extended, he waits his worth, while the citrusy flesh, exposed to mid-day sun, shrivels brown and collapses into a pulpy mess that, when she passes, draws a mere wave to topple it easily. IV. As the shadows of a jagged-tooth fencepost lengthen a sudden and thoughtless appetite grows in him. He grabs the third orange and gobbles it all down but a lone slick seed that sticks in his deflated cheek. Bewitched by the seemed break in magic’s promise, he makes this kernel an offering to devouring soils and lays his hard head upon the single-seeded bed where he drowses, rocked by soft-chirped serenades. Then, a quake and a tree sprout. Spreading branches lift him up among the strangely branded fruit that an orange-tongued fairy nibbles as she tosses green locks and smiles at him with her hazelly gaze.
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