Zilch

In preparation for the longest voyage of my life, I brought with me this diary in which I imagined I would record all my thoughts & dreams & observations as I watched the world pass by.  I had been warned that a bumpy carriage would not be ideal for continuous writing but I did suspect I'd get used to it at some point & perhaps even develop a kind of shorthand for common sights which would come in handy on particularly treacherous roads.  Surrounded as I would be by dear Mother, who was perhaps too unwell to take this journey, & by my darling sister Carolyn, whom I couldn't imagine sitting still for the days & maybe weeks we'd be traveling, & also by our faithful Jerves, without whom we almost certainly couldn't feed ourselves, I truly thought my mind would need the distraction of putting pen to shaking paper, not just for my sanity but also to aid my memories once I was too old to vividly recall my youth.

It was all for naught, of course, thanks to the untimely intervention of Zilch, the talking banana.

Have you ever in your wildest dreams imagined a banana could talk?  Of course not!  The common banana has no mouth, no face, no larynx or lungs to push air out to make sounds.  & yet, as the carriage drove straight & slow down one monotonous road after another, I found this banana - who told me its name was Zilch - talking to me.

Afraid I was quite losing my mind, I asked dear Mother if she too could hear the fruit speaking.  She said of course she could.  & my darling sister Carolyn?  Yes, she had already met Zilch.  Faithful Jerves?  What about you?  He had expressed some doubts that it had actually formed words, but now that we had all agreed it had, yes, he had taken notice of the unusual situation.

Which of course begged the question: why was the banana talking to me?  The truth is, we had hardly even seen a banana before.  It may have been at the Davenports when their son Richard returned from a naval tour.  A banana was quite the novelty.  There was something else: I was quite certain we hadn't packed a banana.  I even asked faithful Jerves if he had packed a banana, & he told me he assuredly did not.

Needless to say I had very little time to write during that journey as Zilch almost literally talked my ears off.  For such a small thing, it had a lot to say.  It fancied itself well-read, & quoted a phenomenal amount of literature, all of which I had never heard of.  The Papaya Debacle, for example, a rousing tale by the eminent writer Freenick Zolph.  Or the set of witty poems by the estimable Princess Yardbo Zull, many of which Zilch knew by heart.  & not just literature - no, I heard many extracts from the great Yogot Beelee Chronicles, which dispassionately told the story of the continent from which Zilch & its kind came.  I wished I had been an historian of some kind, to capture some of these facts which were hitherto hidden from our own scholars.

Alas, I had reason to believe Zilch may have been fabricating many of these stories.  I shan't accuse it of outright lies!  But it was a young banana, it spoke broken-heartedly of being separated by its bunch, its large family transported across the sea to be torn apart & consumed by humans.  This was a theme it returned to again & again, often getting angry if it had shared a little wine with me - I would let it soak a bit if it seemed parched - & though I didn't fear it, it often muttered words of malice, spoke of revenge, & even shouted once - not at me - but at dear Mother!

But before the journey ended, Zilch ripened, blackened, & died.  So many questions remained after its demise.  These are questions I hoped to ask other bananas I might meet in my journeys, but fate & circumstances conspired to keep that fruit from me for most of my life.  Certainly since Zilch, I haven't seen nor heard from a banana.  & after dear Mother died in the suicide-pact she formed with faithful Jerves, my grief prevented me from even remembering Zilch for many years.

It was a chance encounter with a plantain named Ziggy that brought these memories to the fore.  But that tale, surely, is for another time.