Fruity the pig and the giant banana

Over the summer, I got ambitious with a fairly epic Fruity the pig story. It took almost a full month to tell, and I’ve been working on writing it down since my small audience member continues to request a reprise and I’m already forgetting it. These kinds of improvised stories are beautifully impermanent, which is great unless you tell a really good one and are on the hook for remembering every zany detail.

The long one is taking many thousands of words (I might have it illustrated as a Christmas present?), but here’s a shorter one that Lucy chose from the most recent batch, for a dose of whimsy for your day.

Once upon a time, there was a little rainbow-colored pig, and her name was Fruity. Usually, Fruity and her 5 best friends played together every day. But today, Fruity and her very best friend, Megatron the bunny, decided to go on a special picnic - just the two of them. They packed up their favorite foods and treats into a basket: peanut butter and honey sandwiches, carrots (extra for Megatron), hummus, grapes, a perfectly ripe banana to share, and 3 kinds of cookies. It was a beautiful morning and they planned to do plenty of exploring before lunchtime, so they set out through the meadow behind Fruity’s house and into the woods where they played and went on adventures almost every day.

They found some excellent climbing trees and climbed far higher than they usually could. The green leaves brushed Fruity’s face as she swung on the branches, while Megatron jumped from limb to limb near the tree’s sturdy trunk. They pretended the tree was a spaceship and that the different knots and bumps in the bark were all kinds of fancy spaceship buttons. They might have stayed in the tree all day, if their tummies hadn’t started growling and if the cookies in the bottom of the basket hadn’t seemed to be calling their names.

They jumped down from the tree and walked to a nearby creek to find a cozy place for their lunch. Megatron found a nice flat and grassy spot and with a few little gray mushrooms that she kicked out of the way before they unloaded their feast. Fruity tipped the basket over so they could eat dessert first (it was a special occasion after all), and the banana rolled over a few times and landed where the mushrooms had been growing.

Fruity was part way through an oatmeal raisin cookie and Megatron was nibbling on a snickerdoodle when they realized that the banana was much larger than it was when they had arrived. In fact, it was growing right before their eyes! They grabbed their cookies and jumped back as the banana grew and grew and grew until it was taller than Fruity, and then taller than Megatron when she stood on Fruity’s head, and then even taller than Megatron could reach by jumping off of Fruity’s shoulders!The banana was officially giant.

Fruity and Megatron were speechless. Nothing like this had ever happened on their adventures in the forest before! Megatron supposed that something in the mushrooms woke up something in the banana that made it grow so huge. It had stopped growing, but now they had to figure out what to do with a giant, yellow-with-brown-splotches banana in the middle of the forest.

Fruity thought they should still eat it, and though it tasted good, they hardly made a dent before they were both tired of banana flavor. Next, they used a little knife in the picnic basket to cut a small slice out of the banana that they tried to use as a frisbee, but it turned out to be a little bit too sticky for that. Fruity, who loved hats, made a hat for herself out of the brown stem at the top and a piece of the peel. It looked very dashing and fashionable, but it did keep sliding over her eyes, so she had to take it off after a while.

It was Megatron who had the best idea of the day. She thought they should peel the banana and make a raft so they could go sailing down the creek. It is very hard to peel a banana that is bigger than you, especially when your tummy is full of cookies and banana, but Fruity and Megatron were very hard workers. Soon, they had tied the peel to some pieces of wood and made a very sturdy raft.

Fruity grabbed her hat and what was left of their lunch, and they sailed down the creek, munching on things they were glad were not bananas, and seeing their beloved forest from a brand new perspective. They agreed it was the favorite best friend picnic they had ever been on.