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I climbed a tree with a slice of pizza in my mouth.
The tree was tall, with a thick trunk and long branches. From the outside it looked like a carrot if carrots grew upside-down and if carrots were green and their leaves were brown and they were not exactly all in one piece and somehow levitating.
I guess it didn’t look like a carrot much at all. The pizza slice also looked like a carrot if carrots were actually perfect triangles and if my pizza slice were also actually a perfect triangle and if carrots were the color of cheese and cooked dough and whatever toppings were on the pizza that day.
I had a carrot in my pocket. The carrot looked like a carrot. This carrot was for Rabbit, the old lady next door. She was not born with the name Rabbit, I don’t think, but we all call her that nowadays. She had silver hair that she parted into two braids and she didn’t jump like a rabbit or twitch her nose like a rabbit, though she had sometimes twitched her nose pretty similar as a matter of fact to a rabbit whenever I had brought her one of my baked dishes in times past, come to think of it.
The carrot was for her famous stew. It wasn’t the worldwide kind of famous, but the neighborhood kind. The pizza slice was because I was hungry. Pepperoni, pickles, and garlic beans. It was not my favorite, but also not necessarily below third place on my pizza chart.
I climbed the tree with the slice of pizza in my mouth, and I looked down. This was not an unusual thing, as being so high made it hard to look much higher. Sunny days were the norm that summer. Looking down, I saw Rabbit. The tree had a perfect view of her yard. Every day at noon, I would climb that tree to enjoy the breeze and the feeling of nature around me. At the same time, she would head to her yard to tend to her garden. It needed lots of watering in that sunny weather.
She smiled, she waved, she called out “hello helu hilalala” (it doesn’t mean anything; I checked) and she asked me if I had “the lovely precious carrot” or if I was going to leave her “in terrible misery and agony forever.” I held it up nice and high to show her that I indeed had the carrot. Of course, it was already up nice and high, because I was in the big carrot-shaped tree.
My jaw was tired and the pizza was slipping so I went to fix my grip. Fixing my grip did not help, because my jaw was just that tired, so I decided to hold the pizza instead. My carrot hand was also tired because of a detail I forgot to include which is that the carrot was absolutely gargantuan. I realized that returning it to my pocket was no longer an option, as the carrot had begun to tear the stitches holding on the pocket. In a brilliant maneuver, considering I was still in the tree, I successfully performed a one-second juggling act (maybe two-second) and switched the pizza with the carrot. The one thing I did not take into account, however, was the grease. This pizza was maybe one of the greasiest and nastiest I had ever seen. There is no way I could ever properly describe it to you; you just have to believe me.
You will believe me, then, that it was a complete mistake when the now-greased carrot slid right out of my greased hand and flew all the way towards Rabbit, smacking her atop the head. It wasn’t my fault. How was I supposed to know that she was of the age that a fall would mean her end? How was I supposed to know that she would be standing exactly right there where the carrot for her famous stew would land? It couldn’t have been my fault.
All I wanted was some of her stew, your honor.