The Isle of Tutti Fruity; fiction by AM Larks
The Isle of Tutti Fruity
AM Larks
Little Georgey Lewis couldn’t believe his luck. HE had been invited to play at Harlan Ford’s house. Harlan was…well, Harlan. Different and foreign. He had just moved here from California and had even seen a movie star once ‒ though Harlan couldn’t remember which one. Harlan had seen scary movies and was allowed to play outside after dark sometimes. This was Georgey’s ticket.
Georgey was walking up to the front door trying to contain the excitement that ran through to his very fingertips, when he heard muffled voices floating over the back gate.
“I AM KING LOTT-OF-A-LOT! DO AS I SAY!” a voice shouted, “YOU ARE ON MY ISLAND. THE ISLAND OF TUTTI FRUITY.”
Drawn like summer night mosquitoes to exposed skin, Georgey peered through the slats to spy on what lay beyond the fence.
Harlan –King Lott-of-a-Lot – was directing the neighborhood children to do something. What was going on? Georgey had never seen anything like this: one child, one kid in command of others. Georgey wasn’t even sure that it was allowed, even in make-believe.
Georgey kept peeking from side to side, watching the kids hauling things and all sorts of stuff from one side of the yard to the other, piling it behind the large oak with the unfinished treehouse. He leaned too hard and the fence groaned with a loud SQUEAK! “OH, NO!” he thought as the kids instantly stopped moving and Harlan –King Lott-of-a-Lot glared angrily at the fence. Then Georgey felt a sudden release as he heard the click of a gate unlatching. Georgey found himself sprawled on the gravel walkway at the feet of a mighty king. Everyone who had stopped mid-task was now staring at him.
The day had started out so well. He had finally gotten to the prize in the cereal box – a decoder ring--and Harlan Lott, the new kid from California, had invited Georgey to play. Where had it gone wrong? Georgey contemplated this while standing with his hands tied together to a sapling that had sprouted in the shade of the oak on the side of the detached garage. His restraints were a pink and white striped jump rope. Both pink plastic handles were cracked and one side was chipped and digging into Georgey’s arm, drawing blood.
Georgey’s cheek still hurt from falling on the gravel. Tommy, the six-year-old from down the street, had replaced Georgey’s glasses on when they flew away from Georgey’s spying, traitorous face. But Tommy never had glasses and had put them on all wrong. Georgey now saw the world two ways: like a diamond in his right eye and half blurry in his left.
A rumbling started in the crowd that Georgey was pretty sure had gathered in front of the oak; at least in three quarters of his vision there was a crowd. Georgey heard the stamping of feet and the smacking of fists to hands. Georgey was sure this was not allowed.
“QUIET !!!” King Lott-of-a-Lot shouted from atop his platform.
“GEORGEY LEWIS, FOR THE CRIME OF ASININE-ERY,” King Lott-of-a-Lot shouted out clear, “YOU ARE CONDEMMMMMNNNNNEEEDDDD!!!” For increased dramatic effect King Lott-of-a-Lot lowered his voice into a spooky voice pitch and drew out the word “condemn” to match his outstretched hands vibrating above his subjects.
“YEAHHHHHHHH!!” cheered the crowd instantly..
Georgey dropped his head and stared at the ground rather than the wooden platform in the tree. In doing so, his glasses slid to the tip of his nose, threatening to escape off his face.
King Lott-of-a-Lot jumped down from his royal platform to greet the prisoner, now facing almost certain doom.
“WHAT SHALL IT BE?” questioned his highness, forcing poor little Georgey Lewis to his knees.
“PINEAPPLES –O–PLETHORA?” called out the King.
The crowd whopped in delight.
“Go forth Tommy of the Tom Toms,” the King commanded, “and fetch the PINEAPPLES –O–PLETHORA!”
As little Tommy ran toward the house, the crowd whooped again barely containing their excitement. Georgey pleaded with God, who he was sure wasn’t listening because he hadn’t really been saying his bedtime prayers (he just pretended to), and he hadn’t really been brushing his teeth in the morning like his mom told him to (but he said he did), to keep him safe, to get him out of this. Georgey was sure that those lies had put him squarely out of God’s favor.
Georgey looked up at Harlan who was looking down at his kingdom, his subjects. He thought that Harlan looked resplendent; his robe (Grandma’s Hawaiian Mumu) fluttered in the wind and his scepter (Grandpa’s cane with the rubber foot missing) marked his every stride. Harlan was a real King. Georgey was in real trouble.
Georgey looked out to the crowd as they waited their murmurs growing and growing and for the first time, Georgey really saw them. The subjects were mostly boys, and in the heat of the noon-time sun, they had taken off their t-shirts. They were smeared with dust, dirt, and grime and had wild hair. There were a few girls in the crowd intermixed with the boys, and other than being in dresses and stockings they did not appear much different than the boys, except that the dirt was focused only on their legs and faces. They all stood like peasants ready to revolt.
Tommy returned to the kingdom at top speed and the crowd parted, making way for the page to speak to his majesty. “Your mom said she doesn’t have any pineapples and to not make a mess out here,” delivered Tommy in a small voice in between gasping breaths.
“WHHHAAAATTTTTT???!!!!” bellowed King Lott-of-a-Lot from his royal platform.
“YOU ARE BANISHED, TOMMY OF THE TOM TOMS!”
The crows let out a collective gasp.
In an instant Tommy burst into tears. Harlan realizing his mistake in choosing young Tommy for banishment, he jumped down and whispered something into Tommy’s ear. Tommy stopped sobbing and his cries began to peter out.
“DUE TO HIS YEARS IN SERVICE, TOMMY OF THE TOM TOMS IS UNBANISHED!”
The crowd whooped and hollered again.
Tommy then whispered something into the King’s ear and they both looked over at Georgey still down on his knees tethered to the sapling. A smile began on Tommy’s face and traveled across Harlan’s. This only served to make Georgey shudder.
“ TOMMY OF THE TOM TOMS SAYS THAT THE PRISONER LEWIS SHALL BE EATEN ALIVE!!!!”
The crowd became uncontrollably ecstatic, fists flew into the air, and bodies jumped around, colliding.
Tommy disappeared again through the mass of celebrating bodies. Georgey, his head hanging down even lower than before, had acquiesced to fate. God didn’t ever want him to see the fourth grade. This is what he got for feeding vegetables to the dog, farting on his sister, and coloring the end of Mary Lou Miller’s braid in class.
Before Georgey realized it, Tommy was back with a jar of something in his left hand. Georgey wasn’t ready to die. He hadn’t even said his final goodbyes. He hadn’t pled with God to spare his life. He hadn’t even gotten to have his candy cigarette yet. He should get his candy cigarette. He couldn’t die. Not yet. It wasn’t procedure. It wasn’t fair.
Out of breath, Tommy tore off the lid of the jar. Then the King and Tommy smeared the gooey contents all over Georgey’s clothes, legs, arms, and face. Some of it, he would find out later, even got inside his tennis shoe.
Georgey struggled against the rope at his hands. The rope had, at some point, shaken free from the sapling which allowed Georgey to roll on the ground, writhing in protest at the incoming hands coating him in sticky goo. Georgey violated, resisted until he realized what the mysterious goo was, which only occurred after a large glob was spread over his nose. It was just peanut butter. It was only peanut butter. There was nothing to be worried about with peanut butter. A little bit of legume slime, nothing dangerous about it. It made no sense as a punishment, but it was just peanut butter.
After Georgey was fully coated, King Lott-of-a-Lot pulled the prisoner to an upright seated position. Blades of dry cut grass stuck to his entire body, Georgey, now uncontrollably itchy, reached forward to scratch a particularly annoying spot behind his right knee. It was then he saw them: four monstrous feet pacing behind the legs of the crowd. Next, he saw only a big black nose, sniffing and honing in on the delicious smell of peanut butter. Georgey’s vantage point allowed him the precise position to watch the pacing of the giant nose and the four impatient legs attached to it.
The pacing and the sniffing. The sniffing and the pacing. “Don’t let it eat me. Don’t let it eat me!” was all Georgey could think. He was on the point of tears when he didn’t see the paws any more. No paws. No nose either. Panicked, Georgey only thought, “It’s coming for me. It’s coming for me!”
Devoid of sense, Georgey muttered out a “ NNNNNNNNNNNNN” before being tackled from the side by a golden flash. “Nnnnnn,” murmured Georgey on the ground, a massive tongue licking and licking him, over and over. “Nnnnn,” Georgey’s hands, finally free, reached out and touched … fur …. real and fake fur. Georgey opened his eyes--they had been squeezed shut since the tackle--to find a golden retriever wearing the mane of a baby sized lion Halloween costume. Giggling profusely, Georgey rolled while the lion licked relentlessly washing him clean with saliva.
“HARLAN LOTT, PLAYTIME IS OVER,” came a motherly voice from the far side of the yard. The Ilse’s subjects instantly scattered. Georgey was still fighting off the vicious beast as he tried to stand. At every juncture, sitting up, kneeling, or half way standing, Georgey could expect to find the tongue impeding his ascent.
Harlan disrobed and leaned over to say to Georgey, “Good show Georgey. I totally believed it.”
Georgey only managed a nod. A smile on his face and a laugh caught in his throat, either from his luck, the lion, or Harlan thinking that Georgey had been acting.
“They ate it up. I knew … I mean … I just knew you were the right guy for the job,” continued Harlan, pumping his fist down in triumph.
“Tomorrow, right Georgey?”
“We’ll do this again …” stammered Georgey, laughing hard when the lion hit the back of his knee.
“Yeah. Maybe. Or something totally different!” shouted Harlan with a wave and a smile as he headed to the sliding glass door, leading the hostile beast inside by its red collar.
Georgey slowly walked home. Shaken, happy, confused. His shoes stuck to the sidewalk and each step made him peel his sole off the concrete. He was alone, no one was out in the heat of the day, when the wavy lines appeared on the street at the neighborhood smelled like tar. A trail of ants had started to follow him.
AM Larks writes fiction, nonfiction, and drama. Her writing has appeared in Scoundrel Time, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and the Zyzzyva and Ploughshares blogs. She is the current Fiction Editor at Please See Me the Photo Editor at Kelp Journal, and she is the former Blog Editor of The Coachella Review. She earned a B.A. in English Literature, a Juris Doctorate, and her M.F.A in Creative Writing from the UCR Palm Desert's low residency program. She lives in Northern California.
Inquiry
In this story I wanted to complicate the world that a child inhabits. I think that as adults we can assume children's worlds are easy or at least easier because we are looking down from our position. We often nostalgically remember the wondrous things of our childhood, but as we were experiencing them, they were not always only full of wonder, but were often strange and terrifying. In childhood, especially perhaps this intermediate period of childhood between toddlerdom and the more worldly middle school ages, humans are especially wild. Wild in the sense that they retain elements of our perhaps more essential natures that civilization has yet to tame out of us. It is fascinating to explore the impulses, strange rites, beliefs and rituals of this period of time that each of us adults has come through, but so long ago that it seems foreign, strange, distant and perhaps even a bit unreal to us.
Who indeed are we without the confining rules, structures, and norms that shape us? Is innocence always benign? Is there perhaps something more sinister that lurks within each of us? And is there an equal force innate inside of us that keeps that impulse in check? Can such questions be answered universally, or is each person a unique makeup of good and evil? Is there any way to know?