Fruit Salad Series

BY EVANTHEA KYRIACOU

I've always had a love for creating my own characters and so I decided to create a series inspired by different fruits.

I like to experiment with personifying different things to see what I can come up with and I thought that fruit would be a fun theme!

Her bare toes meandered through the red dust. Eyes glazed over and staring through the earth below, a bony tail entered her vision. Sphynx cats swirled themselves against the towering, electric-blue poles.

"Can you hear me, cats?"

They kept swirling, meowing intermittently. The cats inched closer and closer to her ankles, but never touched the skin there. Her limbs prickled from the increasingly bitter wind. She swung to warm them. The chains creaked. Rust fell from the sky. The rubber seat cut lesions into her thighs. She had been there for hours, days, months now. Yesterday. Today. And all the days to come. None of it mattered now.

The playground was deserted. Why had no one come looking?

She could not leave. Not now. She was finally free — despite the cuffs around her wrists, tightened to the loops in the chains of the swing set. She did not remember how she had arrived there or why she had stayed so long. But she knew she was special.

"I’m

special. Aren’t I?"

The cats had begun climbing the poles now, too intent on clawing their way up to respond. Oh, she had always despised cats anyway.

Such idiots they were, she thought as she pumped her legs harder. They were scratching away at the set — made of a material for which their paws were simply inapt. Their faces were contorted with strain as they flailed up the slope, never reaching the summit. Bodies tumbled down the cold and unforgiving steel and crashed into the dirt. They would lick their wounds and begin the voyage again. See? Idiots.

She was swinging quite high now. The set was rocking and knocking the cats off before they were even a quarter of the way along the pole. Christ, they were boring! She would never be that boring again. And so tragic! She thought as the swing shook harder in the wind. The sky had started to spit. And the cats