Crime & Punishment!

It all started SO innocently.  A young woman:

And her banana:

This past fine Saturday morning, the young woman had taken the banana and placed it lying sideways on her dining room table, on top of a Laurel Burch place-mat, intending to eat it for her healthy mid-morning snack, along with a nice, fresh cup of coffee.

Of course, the innocent young banana had no way of knowing the fate awaiting it.  But it is a fate common to many such bananas in today's world.  And the young woman was known to be a kind person - she wouldn't wish the unwitting fruit to suffer needlessly.  No, no, no.  Its demise would be as quick and painless as possible.  No one need suffer - least of all, the banana.


But life takes mysterious turns.  Look the other way, become even slightly distracted, go into another room for only a few minutes - even LESS than a few minutes - and in such a short space of time, whole lives can alter irretrievably, irrevocably ... irreparably.


Such was the case with Mr. Banana.   

Before enjoying her mid-morning nosh, the young woman left the dining room for barely two minutes - nay, not even two! - to transport laundry from the dryer into her bedroom, leaving the banana on the place-mat.  When she returned she found, to her astonishment, that the banana was no longer on the place mat.

Her banana .... was MISSING.

First, she was puzzled.  "I know it was there when I left just now," she said to herself, scratching her head.  Then, she felt a brief moment of panic.  Suppose, she thought desperately, the banana had escaped?

As this nearly-uncomprehensible thought crossed her mind, she happened to look down at her feet and there, in a scene which barely equaled the horror found in most Hitchcock films, she discovered the awful, shocking truth.

THE BANANA HAD BEEN MURDERED!


Who could DO such a foul and heinous deed to a poor, innocent, ripened fruit?  What sort of twisted, fiendish mind could find pleasure in an act such as this?  Why, the drop from the top of the table alone had to be at LEAST three feet!  What agonies did this poor, semi-sentient, edible creature suffer during its trip from the table top to its final, carpeted destination?  Did it think of its fellow bananas, lying far away on the other side of the kitchen counter, blessedly unaware of the perils and pitfalls of the real world?  Or did it feel a sense of tragic abandonment by the young woman, and silently curse her name as it traveled downward in an unstoppable trajectory?

Her head whirling, the young woman gently picked up the poor banana and, as she did so, her eye fell upon THIS cat (heretofore known as "THE SUSPECT" and who, NOT coincidentally, it is believed, was looking in the very direction in which the banana was lying):

Ladies & gentlemen of the jury, I put it to you that THIS CAT - who goes by the "nom" de plume "Selina" - either murdered the unfortunate banana in cold peel, or else meowed things to it so desperate, so upsetting, so disturbing, that the fruit - ravaged by agony and grief - somehow threw itself off of the table, thereby ending it all and leaving a world it was too good for in the first place.  

Who can say which scenario it was that took place in that silent dining room, on a sunny Saturday morning?  Of course, there were no witnesses.  There can be no trial because cats can't be sued (they have no material assets) and they cannot be criminally charged (handcuffs are not made small enough to fit them and getting a good mug shot would be damn near impossible, anyway).  Justice cannot, ultimately, be done to the sad banana who, in the end, was eaten anyway.


But this cat - this SELINA - has whatever she did to live with, on HER conscience.  Would YOU want to be her?  

I don't think so ...


Is there a moral to this twisted tail of fruit-icide?  In the end, I think it surely must be:


NEVER ABANDON YOUR BANANA.  

It's a jungle out there.