As the women fruit started to disappear, the men fruit and girl fruit changed their behavior. There were no more games of monkey in the middle, no more (even before the women were all gone) clandestine meetings behind drooping leaves or maternal stroking of cornsilk hair. The men fruit failed to thrive; they stopped foraging at the ground, pecking at seeds and grazing on small pieces of grass. Gradually, day by day, the men fruit wilted and browned until their green tendrils let them go and they fell, shriveled, to the earth. The girl fruit, then, would spend their days running as far as their tethers would take them, from this shriveled man to the next, putting their fruity ears to the sunken chests, running their fleshy hands over the wasted men-fruit faces. And then there was the burying – the digging of small holes in the ground with their tiny hands, the dirt staining their skin brown, the gathering of the women-fruit stones and puckered and withered men-fruit bodies, the heaping mounds of buried sorrow strewn across the ground.
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