»
Main Forums
»
Passions in Prose
»
Another Twisted....
| Passions in Prose |
|
Another Twisted.... |
|
|
fractal007 Senior Member
since 2000-06-01
Posts 1958 |
Why my life is like a Bowl of Cherries An Essay for my School My life is like a bowl of cherries. Each of my cherries is red. They lie in a bowl that is white. The white bowl sits on a table, and the table sits on something. I can’t remember what it’s called. Each of my cherries has a great gleam to it. Its stem stands high and mighty, saluting anyone who walks by here to make sure that everything is okay. But sometimes, if you look close enough, you can just see something underneath the topmost layer of cherries in my white bowl sitting on a glossy table. It isn’t a glimmer or a shiny thing or even a stem standing at attention to show you that there is nothing wrong. Oh no. Rather, it is something far more hideous. It is something you don’t want to know about. I think it was labelled the urge to kill. No. No, I think it might have been called taunting, or something like that. I’ve walked by other bowls in my life. When I actually wanted to, I looked close enough, and in some bowls, where the cherries weren’t strong enough to reflect all of the light, I could just catch a glimpse of it. Sometimes I saw a red eye looking out at me. Other times I saw a pair of mouths, hideously formed on the edge of one of the cherries deeper down in the bowl. I remember one day when I learned not to ask another boy what it was that I saw deep in his bowl. I remember it well. He stood up. He reached his hand deep into the bowl, so that some of the cherries broke open and bled all over his skin. He tore an awful thing out. Oh, I cannot describe it to you. It would scare the living soul from you. And into my bowl it went. Now, if you look just close enough. You can see it. But now I am exploring my cherries. I am eating each and every one. Slowly, the layer is coming off. Slowly the skin is pealing and what is underneath is showing. But every time I get one layer off, another forms. Every time. The faces stare out at me. The deformed, deaf ears, shaped by everyone else, hear nothing of what I say to them. The skin on some of those cherries. It wrinkles and pulses. But whenever the shadow of the cherries above is removed, the light outside removes the awful sights I see. Under every layer is something hideous. It lives in the shadow of everyone’s cherries. Slowly, I will eat away all of my cherries. Slowly, all of them will disappear. In the end, all that will be left will be the white bowl, shaped, moulded, formed for me by you. I won’t discover what is truly under that top shiny layer that everyone sees. I’ll keep peeling until I find nothing. And then my bowl will be taken from me and my table burned. And I will be left standing, alone, on something. I can’t remember what it’s called. "If history is to change, let it change. If the world is to be destroyed, so be it. If my fate is to die, I must simply laugh" |
||
| © Copyright 2002 fractal007 - All Rights Reserved | |||
|
mauddib Member
since 2002-01-12
Posts 119melbourne australia |
As you walk through an orchard, or a market shopping for fruit. Do you not pick the shinny ones? Do you remember climbing plum trees, always having to climb higher and higher to get the best fruit? sometimes, there's a worm inside, but this only makes us more carefull when we bite. |
||
|
poetry_kills Senior Member
since 1999-12-04
Posts 549new orleans |
dear fractal, this is a very interesting piece, to be sure... rather dark and more than demented, but i like it... perhaps more because of those things than in spite of them... the only part i found awkward was the "the living soul" (paragraph 4)... it seemed a bit forced (and something like a mixed metaphor, though it isn't), but perhaps that's only my reading of it... i have to say that the overall point of the cherry bowl was lost on me as well, though i certainly allow for the possibility that you intended this horrific candy-coated reality to be vague and obscure so that each reader would have his or her own interpretation of the image used in the essay... as best i could interpret (based mainly upon your labels at the end of the second paragraph) the darkness lurking beneath the surface represents our evil, carnal, terrifyingly wicked, but perfectly natural urges... i very much like the way you use the last few lines of the essay to tie back into the opening statments... i like closure and repetition and all those other helpful literary techniques that get me to remember what i should remember from a work... good job and i pray that no one serves you cheesecake anytime soon... sincerely, jerome Do not be deaf to me, for if you are silent I shall go down to the pit like the rest. (Psalm 28) |
||
|
Dusk Treader
Moderator
Senior Member
since 1999-06-18
Posts 1187St. Paul, MN |
All your pieces really put my mind into gear, getting me to actually think like few things I've read here. I think I understand most of it, but I don't know. The cherries seem to be the events of a person's life, bright and shining and full of hope when they're near but tainted and dark the deeper they rest, blackened by the "killer instinct" a seeming devil figure. Hmm.. The bottom of the bowl seems to be the meaning of life, at least to me. You're always striving for it, removing the events of your life away, devouring them to get at that goal. And then you find it, and you're bowl or 'life' is taken away and your body burnt... and you're left on something... but we can't know that til we die, correct? The boy though, is harder for me to explain using my metaphor... He doesn't want to sample each cherry.. he wants the goal, or maybe he can't see that each cherry in life has it's sweetness, even if it is pitted. I'm not sure about a lot of this, but even more than what I pulled out of it, I loved how this piece spoke, it almost felt written to me at first... and then maybe to God, with the bowl being "formed for me by you" I'd love to hear your story behind this. Thank you for a thought provoking read yet again, your writing is always pleasing and stimulating. "A hard, cold wisom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil" - Robert Heinlein |
||
|
|
⇧ top of page ⇧ |
|
| All times are ET (US). All dates are in Year-Month-Day format. | ||
