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I. Picked Night
To steal a-way: three oranges for love he was instructed by cackling voices over time become vague though sharply plucked and sealed in wide-mouthed, boyish memory.
So, this picked night, he stalks storybook rows of stubby trees squatting stacked in a maze pulled straight by tender hands to hide riddles — a patchwork of endlessly seamed sameness.
Aided by a sickle moon's pointed glance, he hasty harvests three waxy-lit fruit; the feather-leafed branch loosed, snapping skyward as juicy hope drops neatly in his pouch.
II. Striped dawning
Home on morn's edge, a first love he soon sights her narrow white face with blush-dabbed features, the tall swab of swirled scarlet hair atop, a bobbing tongue that bounces into view.
At striped dawning, he, perhaps too eager, reaches into his bag with halting hand. An under-ripe gift he blurts out to her, offered wholly careless, green-tipped, unpeeled.
She takes it, and rolls it in slender hands thumbs inspecting it, a bit misshapen, bumps and crevices around knobby stem... no fruit for her, nose upturned, she walks on.
III. Mid-day Sun
Days left to his virtuous devices, he fusses over the next, nails digging, screw-cut peeling its thick rind, picking off odd pieces of pith to smooth its surface.
After would-be idol hours spent preening, second love, an acid yellow figment, floats down to him from distant high hilltop her flopped gold curls mopping a wide pink brow.
Fruit in palm extended, he waits his worth while the orange exposed to mid-day sun shrivels brown, a collapsed-in pulpy mess that her passing wave topples uneasy.
IV. Evening dreamed
As jagged-tooth fence-post's shadow lengthens, a sudden unthinking appetite grows. He grabs the last orange, gobbling it all but a lone slick seed that sticks in his cheek.
His magic seeming sadly lost, the kernel he takes, finger-pushes it in topped soil, then lays his head next to single-seed bed and sleeps, drowsed by a soft-chirped serenade.
That night, a tree sprouts of strange banded fruit; perched among its branches, waking he spies a fairy's green tossed locks, and dreamy she with limpid hazel gaze smiles back at him.
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