Pineapple on Canvas: The Odd Adventures of a Toy in the City

The one where Papple eats fruit.

It had been a long week, and although it wasn't yet over, it felt nice to be able to get away from work for just a little while. Ella came out of the shower, wrapped herself in a large Frette towel, a luxury that she only experienced at Maher's place, as all her household belongings came from IKEA, and stopped by Couch Room to check in on what was going on.

She looked contently at her two boys sitting on the large L-shaped sofa, happily munching away. Maher had thick and wavy reddish brown hair that he always kept a few inches longer than the clean-cut crop that was very popular amongst her law firm colleagues. She had always loved music from her parents era, so instead of crushes on the Backstreet Boys or N'Sync, she had always thought Paul McCartney was very dreamy, and Maher looked very much like him in her mind. She paused from her reverie for a moment, and then gasped, "Maher! What is he eating?"

Maher looked up from the game he and the pineapple were watching and shrugged, "We're just sharing a snack. It's healthy, don't worry."

"But what is it?" Ella probed.

"Some nuts and a Sunkist mandarin orange."

"So you gave him fruit?"

Papple, totally oblivious to this exchange sat glued with his glossy black eyes following the figures on the fifty-inch flat screen. Papple was still fascinated by the animated screen and couldn't quite get enough of it.

At this moment, the realization hit Maher. Papple was a fruit eating fruit. . ..

"Papple," Maher said, sitting straight up, "give me what you have in your hands now."

Hearing his name, Papple looked up and popped a segment of the mandarin into his mouth and a big and satisfying smile spread across his face. "Dis good," he said, as he got up on his little orange feet and waddled across the couch, oblivious to the situation he was causing. He held out the fruit, not to Maher, but instead to Ella. "You want fruit? Papple give you last piece?"

Slightly horrified, Ella walked over and took the last segment from Papple's hand. Not sure what to do with it, she ate it even though she had just brushed her teeth and had had no intention of eating anything more that night.

"Thank you, Papple," she said. "Why don't you go and sit back down?"

"Okay, me go watch Small Room."

"The television," Maher corrected.

"Right," replied Papple, the software in his brain storing the information Maher had just said to him, but not quite registering it. "The television Small Room."

"Maher, can you come with me to Room?" Even Maher and Ella had gotten used to calling the different rooms in the apartment by the nomenclature given to them by Papple.

"Okay, coming," he said.

"Don't forget to close door if you go to Room," Papple reminded them, eyes still glued to the television.

"We will, sweetie," Ella promised.

Once in the bedroom, Ella shut the door and turned to Maher. "What do we do? Can he even eat fruit?"

"I don't know," Maher replied, "it's not like there's a manual on how to raise a pineapple stuffed toy! Or is there?"

"No, of course there isn't," Ella replied rather sharply, not wanting to admit that she had actually tried to Google that very same question earlier in the week. "I mean I know that these toys are able to convert certain foods into energy to help power them up, but each toy is different, and I can't imagine someone would perversely program the fruit toy to be able to convert energy from fruit. Do you think it'll make his software malfunction?"

"Well," Maher confessed, "he's actually been having fruit all week."

"What?! How did that even happen?"

"I don't know," he said defensively. "It just did!"

"Did he ask for it?"

"Well, not exactly," said Maher, "it's complicated."

"In what way?"

"I kind of lied to him," said Maher, as he explained the sordid story of the green plastic bags and Papple's related melt down. "I just didn't know what else to tell him, so I told him that they were kind of fake fruits and meant for eating. Then he asked for one, and I couldn't say no."

"Oh my goodness, do you think," Ella stammered, "do you think our little sweet fruit is a fruit-cannibal or something? I just don't know how it works with fruit stuffed toys!"

"No, no," said Maher. "Look, he seems fine and it's been days since he has been eating them. Besides he is just a robot shaped like a fruit, he isn't actually a fruit. Let's just leave it be."

Giving him a skeptical look, Ella agreed that it was probably prudent not to alarm Papple at the moment, but that they would try and decrease his fruit intake and move him onto other sorts of snacks.

Maher left Room to let Ella get changed. When she got back out, she saw Maher and Papple sitting together munching a bowl of cucumbers and carrots.

"Mmmm," she said, "those look delicious! Can I have some, Papple?"

Papple grimaced, and looked forlornly at Ella. "Ella, me no want to give to you. Dis no good at all and make Papple stomach feel no good."

"Really?" she asked.

"Yes, dis is so," the little pineapple toy replied, and almost as if to prove a point, his stomach gave out a loud grumble and a cloud of toxic gas escaped, so potent that Maher had to rush off the couch to get away from the smell.

Before bursting into laughter, Ella looked at Maher and said, "Well, fake fruit diet it is!" And that ended the debate on whether or not Papple would be allowed to eat fruit. Apparently the programmers had decided to have a bit of a sense of humor in determining the sort of things that translated to fuel for the toy.

From then on, Maher always added an extra order of fruit to his grocery list to help appease the little pineapple's "cannibalistic" dietary considerations and to avoid the need for fumigating the apartment.