Pineapple's Paradise

The internet advised me to write about pineapples to overcome my writers block so I'm going to give it a shot.

Ted was envious of the other kids in his tribe. By now they had all ripened to the perfect golden-yellow shade and were being plucked one by one by the kind human hands that harvested them from their tree.
This was such an exciting time in a young pineapples life. It was told by the rotting elders that when the lucky chosen youth were stripped from their mother's branches they would be taken to this wonderful haven called "The Grocery Store" where a kind hearted person would adopt them and care for them until the end of their days.
Oh how wonderful it all sounded to Ted. What he wouldn't give to be chosen with his brothers and sisters! Alas, if his green skin did not turn yellow in the coming days he would be doomed to remain with his mother and rot away with the elders having never known the kindness of a human caretaker.
The following day came and went. Then another, and another. It was soon the human's last day for harvest and Ted still had not managed to become any less green. He feared he would have to stay with his mother tree and was doomed to rot…
But fortune it seemed, was with him that day.
When all of his kin had been cleared away, and all that was left were the baby greens, a new heard of men came and plucked them down from the tree. For some it was far too early to leave momma tree, but for Ted it was a dream come true. They were packed tightly together in a dark box and would not see the light again for two very long days.

Ted was in awe when he was unpacked from the box. The bright fluorescent lights were not warm like the sun had been but their glow made the skin of the pineapples shine. All around him were fruits from far away lands, vegetables he had never seen before, and so very many humans adopting them all. Some preferred ripe fruit while others seemed to lean more towards the greener babies.

For another day Ted waited there, nestled in snugly with his own kind wondering what his new family would look like. Finally he was chosen by the soft hands of a beautiful brown haired woman with her snotty little baby boy.
She was perfect.
She examined him closely with her sky blue eyes then laid him down gently in her shopping cart next to a bottle of a strange orange liquid called juice.

Ted was carried from the store in a plastic bag to his new home and placed in a straw basket next to a tribe of bananas in the middle of a round wooden table.
"Hello friend!" The first, very green banana welcomed.
"Hello!" The next belted, followed by the next, and the next, then the last. "Welcome to your new home!"
"How lovely it is!" Ted replied with great elation. "And how lovely you all are, and our humans! What a dream come true this is!"
"Yes." Spoke the greenest of the bananas again. "Just wait until you hear our mother sing! What a beautiful voice she has. We hear her when she is in the kitchen!"
"What is a kitchen?" Ted questioned.
"It is where the humans take us when we are ripe!" The yellowest banana explained.
"Why do they do that?"
"It is a sanctuary for ripened fruit where we get to live forever!"
"It sounds wonderful! I do hope I ripen soon!"

Ted basked in the joys of his new home and new friends for a whole day. He listened to his new mother sing as she danced about the kitchen and he grew envious of all the fruit who were lucky enough to enjoy her company in that utopia beyond the wall that stood in his way. He wished and he wished that he would soon turn gold so that he too could see that beautiful smiling face of his new mother again. He did miss her so.

That evening the little boy paid Ted and the bananas a visit, and even brought them a new friend. In his hand he held an apple which he tossed into the basket. In exchange he stretched out his stubby arm and reached into the basket, wrapping his sticky fingers around the yellowest banana.
"I have been chosen friends!" The banana exclaimed in great glee as she was pulled away from the others. "I shall see you all in the kitchen!"
The child adjusted her in his grasp and grabbed her tightly by the top of her head in one hand, and round her belly in the other. She let out a little whimper as he tugged her stem, then screamed in pain and terror as he bent it back all the way.
Ted flinched as he heard the crack when Yellow's skin split open, revealing her soft, mushy innards. He watched on in horror as the boy opened his mouth and bit down into yellow's face with his sharp, crooked little fangs and chewed the bit he viciously ripped off.
"They-they eat us?" Ted stammered.
"What are you, stupid!? Of course they eat us!" The apple snarled in reply.
"But what about the kitchen? The great paradise!?"
"The kitchen is no paradise. That is where I live. I have to watch every day as my fellow fruit are chopped, blended, and eaten."
"We have to escape!" The greenest banana cried out.
"There is no escape."

Days passed and Ted's green skin gradually began to grow more and more yellow. Bananas came and went until finally all that remained were the elders who had begun to rot. They lasted much longer than the others but when they began to attract some pesky fruit flies to their degrading bodies the humans took them away.
Ted never forgot the scent of bananas and cake that lingered through the air that day. It was a smell that would forever mark the massacre of the poor old bananas.

The day soon came when Ted's skin was as golden as his sisters and brothers had been on the day they were torn away from their true mother and now he wondered why he had ever been so desperate to become such a colour. He longed for the days he was green and dreamed for the days when he still clung to his mother's branch.
But wish as he might he could not escape the fate that await him.
It was early afternoon when he heard the hum of the sadistic human woman humming in the kitchen. Anxiously he listened to her heavy footsteps as she made her way into the dining room. She smiled as she picked him up from the basket, just as she had done on the first day they met, and she carefully looked him over, her cold steel-blue eyes hungrily examining his ripeness. Ted could do nothing more than cry as he was whisked away from the latest batch of bananas. It did not matter how much he begged, how much he pleaded, she was too busy humming her pretty little song to listen. He was forced to watch helplessly from the kitchen counter as a large knife was pulled from a drawer and he wept silently as the razor sharp weapon pressed against his back. With his last breath he asked "why?" and screamed out in utter agony as his new "mother" began to saw. Back and forth, back and forth, went the blade until Ted was split straight down the middle and rested in a pool of his own nectar.