🥦🌽🍅 Vegetable World 🍆🥒🥕

🍆🥒🥕🥦🌽🍅🍆🥒🥕🥦🌽🍅🍆🥒🥕🥦🌽🍅🍆🥒🥕🥦🌽🍅🍆🥒🥕🥦

“Behold, the atheists' nightmare… [I]f you study a well-made banana, you'll find, on the far side, there are 3 ridges. On the close side, two ridges. If you get your hand ready to grip a banana, you'll find on the far side there are three grooves, on the close side, two grooves. The banana and the hand are perfectly made, one for the other. You'll find the maker of the banana, Almighty God, has made it with a non-slip surface… It's just the right shape for the human mouth. It's chewy, easy to digest and its even curved toward the face to make the whole process so much easier. Seriously, Kirk, the whole of creation testifies to the genius of God's creation.” - Ray Comfort, Protestant minister

Once upon a time there was a banana named Paul who was in a pile of bananas in a crate in a grocery store in Williamsburg (Brooklyn, New York). He was a sentient banana who could think, form thoughts, and creatively ideate similar to a human being. He could not move, nor could he see or hear anything, because he was at the bottom of a large pile of bananas and as such was completely smothered on all sides by his banana kin. He knew nothing but a deep stillness, warmth, and peace.

Though bananas were gradually getting removed from the pile around him as they were picked up by shoppers, Paul was only dimly aware of this as a vague shifting in nestled life-matter around him. Until one day it was the turn for the bananas on top of his to be chosen, at which point, as if a blanket was torn off by a drill sergeant awakening him out of his barracks for his morning routines, he was flooded with the violent fluorescence of the grocery store lights, his world suddenly interrupted by a voluptuous cacophony of intersecting shapes and lines and fragments.

Paul had no eyes due to being a banana, but he had conceptually analogous organs through which he was able to process visual data — it was as if there were two eyes floating above the upper portion of his body near where his head connected to the tip of the banana bunch, similar to how the characters are depicted in the Christian television program VeggieTales, but in Paul’s case his eyes were invisible. The reason he had invisible organs which defied the laws of physics was because he had been gifted them by a wizard who crafted them out of pure magic — this was also the reason Paul was sentient despite not having a nervous system, and the reason Paul had a name, and so on. The specific reason a wizard chose to grant this banana sentience will be elaborated on further in this story.

Through these empty eyes, Paul was able to perceive abominable forms drifting across his vision. They were made of no nameable shape, rather assemblages of blocky elements grafted onto each other in stuttered articulations; they were creatures of obscene, impudently rosy, pore-dappled flesh, with hair sprouting over them at completely inconsistent and thoughtlessly arrayed instances; and in similarly pattern-defying swathes, they garlanded their organic matter in terrifyingly bright and bold cutouts, each one passing by more crudely decorated than the previous. Upon completely unpredictable whims, from time to time one would pass by and thrust out its protuberance of wriggling appendages to snatch one of Paul’s banana kinfolk out of its infant bed, never to be seen again.

Paul lay utterly still (incapable of doing otherwise), abjectly vulnerable, attempting to figure out if he would be next to be chosen. Though his gaze was fixed and frozen at the glacier-white glow of the ceiling ahead, he could make out through his peripherals some of the colors of his banana kin, and he realized that the yellower a brother was, the more likely he was to be snatched away. He took solace in this fact, as his own skin was still as green as the leaves of the tree in Guatemala from which he was borne. Though he had no lungs, in some metaphorical sense he breathed a sigh of relief, and passed a day or so in contentment, feeling the pleasant warmth of his banana kin on his sides and underneath, secure that he would not be stolen from them. Until, some time passed, and he noticed, aghast, that his long thin body was not quite as green as it had been before.

Was he imagining things? No, he was not. Though it was too subtle to say for sure at first, in time he came to see that he was definitely yellowing. And it became uncomfortably clear he had to accept that his time would soon come.

However, the strangest changes were taking place. The yellower he got, and the more he grew to dread the moment he would be snatched away, the more he began to feel like such a thing would not be perhaps as horrible as his initial fears led him to believe. In fact, the appendages which snatched the bananas up began to not seem entirely like unpredictable serpentine predators — there was something about them which was almost inviting, reminding him of the bananas in his midst, but tinged with an exoticism that made them a little more alluring than the kin he knew.

It was in the midst of these thoughts, and his gradual ripening, that he began to get an inkling of his destiny. Though he could not have phrased it in language, at least not at first, he knew what it was that the humans intended to do with his motionless body. And it was right that it was so. There could be nothing better for a banana than to fall peacefully into bits, to be mashed, to melt violently in the acrid juices of the internal organs, to dissolve into particles of energy to be brought forth into being again in the streams and channels of some greater life-form. Dissolution, dissipation, disassembly, rapture. Such was the only service a sentient banana could deign to perform.

The yellow hue crept over his skin like the rising grinning sun slobbering its golden saliva over a Midwestern field of corn husks; daybreak. Now it was not just that he didn’t fear the touch of the abductors of his brothers, he craved it; the brighter his skin became the more necessary it was that it felt the touch of a foreign life-form. With each passing human, he waited with bated breath (metaphorically), until one day one of the towering creatures’ wavering hand broke from its tentative oscillations and shot straight for the tip of his head, seized him and swung him around; dizziness and delirium, his moment had finally come.

After a half-hour-long series of bewildering maneuvers through space in which him and the five bananas attached to his bunch were ported over from one vessel to another, he arrived in a third-floor two-bedroom apartment filled with green houseplants, accumulated reusable shopping bags, teabags, and cookbooks and was placed in a red ceramic bowl on a four-legged blue table. Giddy with confused delight, he began to settle his mind and get his bearings again.

The human being who had purchased him at a grocery store was a woman named Sylvia. She was twenty-four years old, and she had lived in Brooklyn since she had graduated college two years ago. On most days, she made coffee in a French press, then ate a mini-sized container of flavored Chobani yogurt with a sprinkling of granola for breakfast, and on most days but not all, she would follow that up by eating a banana.

She worked from home on her laptop every day and barely left the house except for groceries and for yoga three times a week. She had three good friends and six mostly-friendly acquaintances in the city she would see occasionally, but there was a pandemic happening, and the world-historical crisis was proving an all-too convenient excuse to not feel bad if she forgot to message one of them for a few weeks. Her roommate was named Derek, and he was a gay man. He was a friendly presence, but rarely in the apartment; he had at least two semi-consistent sexual partners he would spend most of his time away with, flittering between.

On the first morning that Paul lay in Sylvia’s apartment, curved and supine in the red bowl under a gently flickering light, he felt flush with anticipation, not knowing when he would again know the caress of the hand who had swept him into this place, but sure that it was near. Sylvia swallowed down her last spoonful of her morning yogurt, tossed the empty container into the recycling, and after a lingering glance as she gauged her hunger, she shot forth her hand to the bunch of bananas on which Paul hung. The moment of spasmodic excitement which flooded Paul’s banana body rapidly passed as it became clear that it was not his day: the banana beside him was ripped off its tether instead.

It wasn’t until Sylvia began to undress the other more fortunate banana for eating that Paul became aware that he had always possessed a second skin beneath his skin. He had grown accustomed to, even pleased with the yellowing of his skin, but the second paler yellow of his banana brother he saw being unceremoniously stripped of his protective shell seemed to be of a more delicate, fragile kind, one which when held against the bright lights of Sylvia’s kitchen seemed tragically exposed and embarrassed. Paul’s non-existent heart thumped as he watched the body-horror going on before him; there was no escaping the conclusion that this would one day happen to him.

Though at this point he wanted nothing more to be snatched up and devoured too, to be stripped of his skin first — exposed, embarrassed, engulfed by light — was too much to bear. A renewed sense of fear crept over him, and he felt just as he was as a young green banana in the grocery store, confused and ambivalent about his fate.

Sylvia finished eating the banana and pulled out her laptop to get started on her work. She was a programmer who programmed in C# to do game development on the Unity engine. Though there was a time — too tragically recent to feel as distant as it felt now — in which she enjoyed this work and felt it was her calling, she was now growing to disdain it.

She was realizing lately that though she loved video games, and that it seemed to have been impossible for her to imagine anything more fulfilling than to be a part of their creation, she was not actually a good computer programmer, and perhaps not even born to make video games at all. Many of her eager twenty-something peers in the industry could produce code, assets, animations, gameplay designs out of their busy fingers like air out of their lungs, all of them racing to release their first indie title on Steam. Whereas she on the other hand had only ever programmed three video games in her life: a Pac-Man clone, a Snake clone, and something she had made for her senior thesis in university called Vegetable World, which was really the only sustained creative project she had been able to put effort into and see through to the end.

She had originally wanted to be a game designer, but switched career tracks to game programming when she realized that you could earn over six figures for a salary that way. She had participated in a Girls Who Code program immediately upon exiting university — which gave her her role at her current company Dynaplex which primarily sold a free-to-play PvP hack-and-slash MOBA — and it was quite clear to her that she would not have be able to retain this role if it weren’t for her gender. At least she didn’t think so. On most days she could barely write more than a few lines of code if she wanted to, but she would also take weeks at a time occasionally, in particularly morbid spirals of apathy, to simply do nothing at all. It wasn’t just because she was a girl that she got away with this — she was also a very pretty girl — through she had not truly realized or understood this until only right around when she graduated college and her social life and thus opportunities for chance romantic encounters had dwindled to near-zero — and it was an almost burningly humane kindness that her coworkers would inevitably treat her with as such. But this advantage was dwindling due to the remote-working life in the pandemic, and now she was stressed.

Sometimes she wondered if maybe she should be trying to work on a project in her spare time, but she wouldn’t know even where to begin. The only thing she had ever built herself, Vegetable World, hadn’t really been that competently built of a game. She was technically only the co-creator; she had split the work with another girl named Kaitlyn in her class who was on her team for the thesis. It was just a “walking simulator” really, a standard first-person exploration game of the variety most easily cobbled together through basic understanding of the Unity engine. The graphics were entirely composed of free assets of vegetables she had downloaded from the Unity asset store, hence the title. The player character walked on roads of lettuce and carrots, jumped on beets, shot broccoli bullets at tomato enemies, and collected cauliflower power-ups.

Day by day, Sylvia would wake up, eat her yogurt, choose another banana from the bunch, idly patter away at keystrokes while switching between Buzzfeed listicles and her various group DMs, accept at around six PM that she was only getting about a quarter of a day’s work done for the day, flip over on the couch onto her stomach, and watch anime with her laptop on the ground and her arms and head dangling down off the couch until she couldn’t keep her eyes open.

Each day during Sylvia’s morning routine, another one of Paul’s banana brethren got snatched up and stripped open, leaving Paul longing and confused. Eventually, the last banana beside him on the bunch was taken too and Paul was left there, sullen and alone, wondering if perhaps his moment would never come, if he would age helplessly out of ripeness before it was too late.

Finally, it was on a Thursday that she would eat the last banana of the bunch — and she almost didn’t — she felt a little queasy and had to make several laps back and forth between the fridge and her desk before she realized she really was hungry enough for more than just the yogurt. She reached out to the lone banana in the bowl, and every fiber in Paul’s fruity being tensed in excitement. The imminent notion of having himself peeled barren tormented him, but the thought of what would happen immediately after — engulfment in Sylvia’s trachea, digestion in her small intestine, absorption in her colon — was enough to carry him through.

He inwardly winced as Sylvia began to use her slender fingers to tear at the outer skin on the top of his head, thrusting it downward over his body, exposing his paleness to the bright daylight. He was all too aware of the light shining on his naked head, on his exposed neck, on his chest, on his stomach, on his belly button, on his abdomen, on his penis, on his testicles, on his thighs, on his kneecaps, on his feet, on his toes… for Paul was suddenly no longer a banana but a full-figured human being measuring about six feet. He plummeted downward out of midair and crashed through the blue table he had previously rested on, splitting the wood in two, the other various household objects which had been on the table tumbling down with him, splinters digging into his now-pink skin. Covered with sweat, he lay naked amidst the wreckage, panting and trembling,

The reason the wizard had put human intelligence and sentience into this banana (Paul) was in order to create a “frog turns into the prince after being kissed” scenario, but with a banana instead of a frog, specifically for the specific situation of Sylvia. The dizzying debilitating shock of the magical spell and its violent intrusion into physical reality was felt with its full effect.

“Who the fuck are you!?!” Sylvia screamed, tottering several steps back and falling over into a cabinet upon which she braced herself. “What are you doing in my house!!?”

Vegetable World, the senior thesis video game Sylvia had turned in two years ago and her most complete creative project to date, had been almost, yet not entirely, composed out of 3D models of vegetables. It had been Sylvia’s idea to propose the vegetable theme, and her project partner Kaitlyn had mostly gone along with it out of what Sylvia perceived to be an ironic sense of humor. Sylvia had done most of the technical work, and specifically sought out the opportunity to tackle the core game-design component: the layout of the levels, the feeling of the challenges, etc. Whereas Kaitlyn’s talents had been more in a narrative, or poetic domain. Kaitlyn had started out making a point to offer assistance on the coding aspect, but as the project went on it was clear that this was not the most logical division of labor — Sylvia was happier with the guts of the technical logic remaining her own realm. Kaitlyn would chime in on specific game design decisions herself, but only really to have a subtle effect on things like pacing, timing, environment.

The area in which Kaitlyn excelled was in contributing dialogue to the vegetable NPCs inhabiting the vegetable landscape, writing the descriptions for the vegetable power-ups, writing the narrative prompts, placing texts on the scattered signposts with a carrot for the pole and a potato slice for the sign itself. The game levels composed of anonymous downloaded assets in crude blocks suddenly became worlds inhabited by princesses and princes, castles, demons, wanderers, kings. And it wasn’t just that the text served the gameplay. There was something genuinely… there within Kaitlyn’s writing too. When Sylvia read it, she felt like she was imagining things the way she had years ago as a little girl, having tea parties with her stuffed animals from The Little Mermaid and Winnie-the-Pooh, or running around on her elementary school playground pretending to be a witch.

Sylvia had let Kaitlyn fill her world with a web of intricate storytelling like this, and she avoided second-guessing Kaitlyn’s decisions or contributing much input of her own. But there was one thing she felt the game wouldn’t be right without. This new idea had come to her first as a ludicrous whim, then when she tried to forget about it, it expressed itself as an insistence.

“The game should end, like,” she began to explain to Kaitlyn. “You have to get to the treasure chest on the top of the mountain. But you don’t know what’s in it yet. Everyone is telling you you need to get there. But they won’t tell you what’s in it. And the treasure chest should be made out of a big pile of broccoli. Then when you open it up, inside there’s a banana! Not a vegetable. Then the game ends.”

“That’s really lovely,” said Kaitlyn. “And maybe we put in a story, it could even be an Easter egg, like… What if the banana was a hidden relic of the ancient fruit kingdom? Which existed long before the vegetable kingdom? And the last king of the fruits was slain by the…”

Sylvia felt suddenly agitated and confused. “No, don’t do that,” she said. “There shouldn’t be anything like that about the banana. It should just be there on its own. It’s funnier that way.” Sylvia pouted slightly. This idea from Kaitlyn wasn’t as good as her usual ones.

“Okay!” said Kaitlyn brightly. “That works too!”

The duo would work diligently on the game for two more weeks, and over time Sylvia came to view Kaitlyn with a certain awe. Her ability to breathe poetic meaning into the crudest of forms was something that Sylvia had never witnessed before, didn’t know where it came from, and had no idea how to imitate herself. Sylvia’s decision to make a game world entirely composed out of free vegetable assets had felt like an empty joke, and frankly one borne out of a degree of simple laziness. But Kaitlyn had imbued it with doomed loves, witches and warlocks, sacred kings, magic fountains, roving bands of children, lost memories, dreams within dreams, wistful nostalgia, past-life atavisms. It was as if there really was a reason for each silly design decision or simple game mechanic Sylvia had made, but not one that she was able to know herself without the help of a friend. Sometimes she wanted to ask Kaitlyn directly if she knew why Sylvia had really decided to make a game all about vegetables. But for some reason she was a little scared.

The duo finished their game, turned it into the professor before the end of the semester, and got an A-. Sylvia felt mostly satisfied with the work, although it always slightly stung to not get the full A. Senior year was ending and it was more important to spend the last days she could hanging out with all her college friends than to worry too much about some grade anyway. But something in her told her that she couldn’t let this be the end of the story of Vegetable World. She had to see Kaitlyn again before she left.

Sylvia opened her iPhone and typed: “Hey, I really enjoyed working on our game together. Your storytelling is sooo good!! I really think you could go so far with that in life if you wanted to. We should hang out again before we both have to go. Maybe we could play one of the new cute indie games I just downloaded on Steam. 😊🥦”

Twelve minutes later, she received a reply back from Kaitlyn. “I would love to! How does Friday night sound? I’m free around 9.”

On Friday at 9PM, Sylvia went over to Kaitlyn’s dorm room. Kaitlyn made them both herbal tea, and they sat on the edge of her bed and watched Death Note for three hours, commenting occasionally on the plot and how cute they both thought the character of L was. There was a lightness and easiness to Kaitlyn’s presence that Sylvia felt impossible to imagine ever holding herself. It was impossible for Sylvia to imagine Kaitlyn not being cheerful, congenial, and sweet. Sylvia felt like if Kaitlyn were to be sad for some reason, it would be the sweetest and gentlest of sorrows, and it could be erased in a moment with a poem, or a painting, or a glass of wine, or a cup of tea.

In the middle of one of the episodes of Death Note, Sylvia craned her head around to face Kaitlyn and kissed her on the lips. It was a completely awkward and incongruous decision, Sylvia felt, there had been no gestures building up to it, but Kaitlyn took it in stride anyway. “That feels nice,” Kaitlyn said. “I really like you, Kaitlyn,” said Sylvia. Kaitlyn responded back: “I’ve always liked you too.”

Sylvia took off her shirt and bra. “Do you like my boobs?“ she asked Kaitlyn.

“They look like…” said Kaitlyn, staring at an empty space to the left of Sylvia’s head. “What vegetable am I thinking of now? Maybe the heads of two cauliflowers.”

Sylvia and Kaitlyn took off all their clothes and spent two hours kissing and caressing each other’s bodies and making love. After they were finished, laying still side-by-side, Kaitlyn’s hand resting tenderly on Sylvia’s chest, Sylvia finally decided to ask the question that had been lingering on her lips the whole time. “Why do you think I wanted to make a video game entirely about vegetables?” she said. “Like what was that really about?”

“Hmm,” said Kaitlyn, putting a finger to her lips. “Maybe it’s because you’re someone who’s really in touch with the earth. You really have a sensitivity to life and nature.”

Sylvia was taken aback by Kaitlyn’s answer, because it didn’t really seem true. Sylvia was someone who tended to spend time indoors — she worked all day on gamedev on her laptop and watched anime at night, and before she had gotten into the indie game scene in high school she had mostly spent her time reading young-adult paperbacks and playing web games like Neopets and MapleStory. She had gone camping twice, only for one night each, and while she did enjoy the stillness of the forest, the whole exposure-to-the-elements thing - the bugs and the dirt and twigs getting into your backpack, having to squat to shit and boil water in a kerosene stove - wasn’t exactly her vibe. But who knows. Kaitlyn did seem to be perceptive about a lot of things. Maybe Sylvia’s in-touch-with-nature side was just repressed, or something like that.

She was too scared to ask the question that came to her mind after that, the one about the banana. “I’m going to go home now,” she said. It was 2AM. Kaitlyn was silent for a few lingering seconds. “Okay,” she eventually replied.

She could have just spent the night — she realized this twenty minutes too late when she was most of the way across campus and back to her own dorm. Why hadn’t she? The thought of sleeping with Kaitlyn — not in the euphemistic sense, but in the sense of actually falling asleep next to Kaitlyn, their arms dangling across each other’s bodies, drifting out of consciousness and into slumber — seemed like a wonderful fantasy now, and she wasn’t sure why she had walked away from it.

Two days later, she texted Kaitlyn again. “Hey, I had a great time the other night. Do you want to hang out again before we leave?” At this point many of the graduates were already starting to leave campus.

She had to wait three hours for Kaitlyn’s response. She replied: “Hey, I had a great time too! 🙂 It’s really hectic with me right now and I have to do a lot of packing up boxes before my flight on Tuesday, but if I end up finishing early we might be able to hang out again. I’ll let you know, and if I don’t see you again it was awesome to work together! 🥗😁”

Kaitlyn never sent a follow-up text, and Sylvia never did either. The two would never see or hear from each other again.

Sylvia hadn’t worked on any video games or any creative projects at all in the two years since then. She didn’t understand her own creative process at all, or what any of her ideas could have meant. When she thought back on Vegetable World, she mostly felt anxious and overwhelmed. And now her breakfast had transformed into a living breathing human being right in front of her in her kitchen.

Twenty-four year old Sylvia was twitching and shrieking, staring down Paul’s splayed form, attempting to process what she saw in front of her. “Why are you fucking naked!?” she cried. “How did you get in here!?”

It was after about forty-five seconds of yelling various gasped interrogations of that kind that she realized the problem she was facing was deeper than some type of home break-in scenario — rather it was a rupture in the laws of physics and reality itself.

A deep, thundering shudder began trickling up her spine. “Who… who are you?” she moaned, babbling now. “I don’t know who you are… I don’t understand…”

Equally terrified, Paul lay still amongst the ruined table, grimacing and trembling, appalled at what his fated ordination had turned into. “I’m Paul!” he choked out between pained sobs. “My name is Paul! I’m a banana! I’m a banana named Paul!”

“How… is… this possible…?” Sylvia asked, in between heavy gasps, blood rushing to her head.

“I don’t know!” Paul exclaimed. “I don’t know! I need help! I don’t know!”

The duo simply stared at each other from opposite corners of the room for about five minutes, tears trickling down Paul’s cheeks, Sylvia feeling as if she was about to vomit, each fielding off armies of confusion, until Sylvia was the one to first speak again. “I…” she began. “I… you… Do you want to put on some clothes? My roommate… Someone could come in…” Sylvia nodded gently in resolve at her own statement. “You know what, let me grab a towel…” Sylvia confirmed , lifting herself off of the kitchen cabinet she had previously been clinging to as if for life. “There’s one in the bathroom,” she said, leaping away from the wall.

Paul suddenly cried out. “No!”

Sylvia tilted her head back around to face Paul. “Huh?” she asked. “You’re naked, Paul… I think maybe… you should cover yourself with a towel.”

Paul struggled to gather his language together. He saw that the human beings covered their mountain-fortress forms in inorganic patterns of bright & jarring colors, but after laying out exposed in the light like this, the thought of wrapping his own skin in some rough unfamiliar texture was felt as a profound agony. “No, you can’t,” he begged. “I’m a banana… I’ve been trapped inside that peel my whole life… I can’t be trapped inside again… I need to be out here with you!”

Stunned back into silence, Sylvia walked back toward the kitchen cabinet and faced Paul from the other side of the room once more. Her and Paul said nothing, each breathing deep breaths. Sylvia gazed up and down the body of the creature in front of her, flung so cruelly vulnerably into the world by the wizard, with no possessions or space to belong within, nothing but a first name.

A long stillness crept into the room.

It took about ten minutes for Sylvia to come up with the next words to escape her lips. “Um… Paul?” She delicately asked. “Would it be better if I got naked too?”

Paul did not respond, merely vibrated slightly in place and fitfully exhaled.

But Sylvia removed all her clothes anyway, folded them and placed them in a pile on the kitchen counter, and sat down on the tiled linoleum floor against the cabinet, across the room from where Paul lay. She crossed her legs and held them close to her chest, her long dark hair tumbling down over her kneecaps, which covered her breasts.

They sat together like that for fifteen minutes, each mutely experiencing the other’s presence. Sometimes Sylvia would let her gaze run up and down Paul’s torso, only to stop before penetrating into his desperate, tear-struck eyes. Sometimes she would be pensively looking at the floor, a whirlwind of images of fruits and vegetables and flowers dancing across her mind’s eye.

A melancholia that had set in started to slowly give over to a strange sense of hope in Sylvia’s heart. She knew she had no idea what was going on, but she was suddenly no longer afraid of it. A smile crept gently onto her lips. “Um, Paul?” She whispered. “What do you think we should do?”

She looked into Paul’s eyes, cold and black, pinpricked with tiny pupils, wells of contradiction and ambiguity. “I need…” he began to stammer. “I need to…” Frantically, he combed his mind for more words. “I’m a banana,” he reiterated, in an urgent high-pitched register. “I need… I need you to eat me!”

“What?“ Sylvia quietly gasped, suddenly afraid once more. “Paul…”

“I need you to eat me!” Paul screamed. “That’s the only thing I need, it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted!”

Sylvia looked into his eyes and read the appeal within, the longing and desperation. She let her lips crawl into a tiny smile once more.

Sylvia stood up slowly, carefully, covering her breasts with one arm and her pubic mound with her other. For two minutes, she stood still like that and stared into Paul’s eyes. She wasn’t sure if she could read into them something like happiness.

She let her arms fall. Her dark hair spilled down onto her exposed breasts, sloping and full, with soft brown nipples only barely set in contrast against her tanned skin. Her torso was thick and sturdy, and as Paul’s eyes moved to her graceful and round hips, it formed the most subtle and elegant of all curves.

She looked back at Paul, still tossed on his back amidst a shipwreck of wood and household appliances. His hands had tensed up, his back was contracted slightly, his stomach pounded in deep oscillations as he drew breath. His penis, as if a stringless puppet under a wizard’s spell, began to lift up slightly from the leg on which it rested.

Sylvia took a few steps closer to Paul, then bent her body down towards the floor to where he lay.  Her breasts swung back and forth like dangling eggplants across Paul’s vision as she drew her head downward, moving toward him. In the slowest and most careful of motions, she put her knees down on the floor, and crawled like a baby to its mother across the tile.

Sylvia smiled. “Okay,” she said.

She swept back her black hair and placed her upper lip on the tip of Paul’s now rigidly erect penis, pulsing with blood, feeling the electricity between their skin. Paul let out a tortured high-pitched moan which shifted rapidly between several frequencies, and then a soft, lingering hum.

Sylvia opened her mouth up and slid her lips over Paul’s cock. She closed her eyes. For almost a full minute she remained nearly motionless, not moving her head, very gently letting her tongue slide slightly back and forth within her, feeling the fullness of presence inside, savoring the tension and the taste. She took a deep breath through her nostrils and lifted her eyelids, bringing her gaze up to search for Paul’s eyes.

But Paul’s eyes weren’t there. His head wasn’t there, and his shoulders weren’t there, and his torso wasn’t there, and his legs and arms weren’t there. She scrambled to her feet, naked. The only thing Sylvia saw was a broken table, an unplugged toaster, and several shattered ceramic bowls. Paul had entirely disappeared into thin air, just as suddenly as he had appeared.

Trembling, Sylvia lifted herself back up. She searched the room. Paul was gone. He was gone entirely. But there was still something in her mouth, filling it deeply, pushing against the back of her throat, making it difficult to draw air. She opened her mouth, reached in, and pulled it out.

Her eyes welling with tears once more, she stared dumbly at the object in her hand. It was a banana.