Flash Fiction


BANANAS by Citrus Creed

It’s like this:

Imagine you love bananas. Maybe you already do, but imagine you loved them even more, like they were the best thing ever. And one day, somebody you’ve never met before gives you a really great banana – better than any other banana you ever had, it’s got a lovely golden yellow colour, just the right amount of curve, firm and juicy texture and a flavour you suddenly realise is exactly how bananas should taste. This person suggests to you that they can get you more bananas, every bit as good so you take them up on it with hardly a second thought.

Soon you’re getting big boxes of bananas delivered to your doorstep twice a week and sometimes even more often. This goes on for months and you end up eating a whole lot of bananas. You have so many that you can share all these wonderful bananas with your friends, there’s more than enough to go round. Perhaps your digestion starts to trouble you a little bit but you put it down to the unusually high nutritional richness that such amazing bananas must contain.

After a while though, the boxes of bananas start getting smaller and smaller and less and less frequently delivered. Then one week no bananas arrive at all. You phone up the person who gave you the first one – they have since become a good friend and you’ve had a lot of fun eating bananas together and laughing like idiots – but when you get through to their voicemail, there’s just an automated message in a robot’s voice saying that the banana crop has unexpectedly failed without explanation.

This seems weird, because the shops are all still full of regular bananas, there’s just no sign of the really great ones.

So you go to the address printed on one of your old boxes because they were such good bananas and other bananas just don’t taste quite the same. When you eventually find the place, it’s a huge, almost derelict warehouse and the front doors are securely locked. You walk around the back but those doors are locked too, with an oversize padlock and a sign with a picture of a vicious guard dog. Unwilling to go home without answers, you break a window on the first floor, shin up a drainpipe and climb on in to the dark interior. The place smells bad, it’s dirty and it doesn’t look as though anyone’s been in here for months.

It seems empty and cold but just as you turn to go, you spy a trapdoor in the floor. Curious, you investigate, and find a ladder leading down to a cavernous basement. It is pitch black in there and the stench is much stronger but you persevere, holding your nose while rats scurry across your feet as you wander between massive, nearly empty vats of foully stinking slurry. Eventually you find a light switch and turn it on. Neon flickers and shoves the darkness back to reveal row after row of machines for making shit taste like bananas...

You get me?



By Citrus Creed, copyright 2008. All rights reserved.





Flash Fiction