Counting Forbidden Fruits.

Thank you Jane for the challenge once again an exquisite picture to prompt us to write press 🔜here 🔙 to join in or read wonderful tales.

The image for this week’s challenge is by illustrator Virginia Frances Sterret and comes from a book of French fairy tales.

“Warning This Is Not A Fairy-tale”.

 

Ernest lay amongst the duck filled pillows, his chest squawking and rasping eerily in the darkened room. Occasionally he propped himself up to spit and decorate the now cardinal stained cloths at his bedside. The drapes were parted to light up the illustration on the wall without throwing light willy-nilly about the room.

He recalled the juiciness of the fruit, the pure, and the innocent that he plucked fresh and devoured. As his memories awoke, his loins stirred beneath the blankets. One, two, six in fifty-three, nine in sixty-four. His mouth filled as he wretched and decorated another cloth. Sixty-four was best he thought as he grabbed at his maleness below the sheets. The time of promiscuity, the upper middle classes at least were disgusted by the freedoms that the young flaunted. Giving him cover and power, who’d believe a half-naked hippy smoking pot in the park over him; no…Sixty-four had a good bouquet.

A nurse entered the stale room to bring fresh handkerchiefs, administer a bed bath and leave his morning news. He may be dying, hopefully, any time now; she thought, but he made her skin crawl. A portly chap who too often stroked or grabbed her in feigned sleep, she’d be glad when this one was done.

The illustration was Ernest’s favourite, it had been the most successful lure, and he intended it to be the last thing he would see on leaving this god forsaken world. .The thought of where he was destined to go held no fear for him. His position and wealth allowed him to indulge in his one passion…  until the eighties when do-gooding became the rage. But many a fellow could never satiate their needs, and would die never sampling the flesh or fulfilling that wicked desire. And here he was, unable to tally how many… how many pieces of forbidden fruit he managed to taste.

 

This evil tale is strictly fiction and bears no resemblance to anyone living or deceased.

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