Ancient Truth | Modern Sound

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who has a strange fruit tree in his yard. When he was given the land by his father he was warned to leave the tree alone or it would overgrow the whole garden. The man lived there alone for a while, but he was lonely, so he fell in love and was married to a beautiful woman.

It just so happens that a black hearted dragon lived next door, and he liked to look over the fence and talk to the man’s pretty young wife. One day the dragon asked the woman about the strange fruit tree.

“Have you ever made a pie from the tree in the middle of the garden?” the dragon asked.

“No, my husband thinks the fruit is poison,” answered the woman.

“Nah! He must be one of those kooky food nuts. You should try it, it tastes like chocolate cream. He probably just doesn’t want you to get fat.” (The dragon said this, but everyone knows you shouldn’t trust a dragon.) 

The woman picked a piece of low hanging fruit and took a small bite, it tasted like chocolate and was filled with gooey chocolate filling. When she bit into it, the filling exploded all over her and dripped on the ground. The man (who had seen and heard everything) walked up and asked what was going on. The woman was standing there with chocolate cream dripping off her chin and handed the man a piece of the fruit.

‘This is soooo good! You have to try a little,” she said to her husband.

He took it in his hand and looked at it. A little can’t hurt, he thought. So he took a little bite, trying to not get the cream all over himself, but as his teeth popped into the fruit it squirted out the other side all over his hands and ran down his arms onto his feet and the ground.

“Man, these things are messy!” He tried to flick the goo off of his fingers, and he made an even bigger mess. He tracked the goo everywhere he stepped. His wife playfully reached up and smeared some of the chocolate on his face. He reached up and grabbed a couple of ripe ones and as she ran away giggling, he threw them at her. She threw some back, and so it was, they laughed and made a huge mess.

That night they both dreamed of chocolate cream.

When they woke up in the morning, the woman was thinking about baking a chocolate cream pie, and the man went out to pick some more of the fruit. The yard was full of little sprouts. Everywhere that the chocolate goo had dripped a new tree was growing. This should have been alarming, but instead the man was pleased. He was thinking of how much money he could make selling the chocolate.

The woman looked out the kitchen window and saw the man standing in the yard. His arms were full of fruit and he was reaching up to pick some more. She could still see chocolate stains on his skin from the day before, they tried to wash it off, but it was very stubborn. Nothing seemed to take it off. She looked at her husband and for the first time she was a little disgusted with him. The way the blotches made him look, the stupid way he tried to hold too many pieces of fruit in his arms, and the dumb look on his face.

The man came back inside and poured his armload into the sink. He looked at his wife. She was looking at him with a strange expression. He also noticed that where her skin was tainted with the chocolate, little black bumps were appearing. He looked down at his hands and saw the same thing on himself.

“We need to get something that can take these stains out,” he said, “I think it’s giving us some kind of rash.”

He looked up in time to see his wife roll her eyes. He hadn’t noticed before how big her butt was getting. She was still talking about something as he walked away.

Later that day his dad came by for a visit. The sprouts had grown to twice their size from the morning and they were taking over the whole yard. He found his son in the garage mixing some cleaners with gasoline and weed-killer trying to find something that would wash off the dark stains.

“Where’s that sweet pretty wife of yours?” he asked.

“I think she’s upstairs taking a bath,” the man answered.

“It looks like you got into that strange little tree that I warned you about,” the father was trying to maintain his cool. He was very disappointed in how foolish his son had been. “Did she get into it, too?”

“It was all her fault,” he answered, “She ate some first and then gave some to me. This stuff is awful! How do you get this mess off?”

The father looked at his son’s rash. It was more prominent than the stain now. There were black bumps growing out of the skin as if the skin was boiling. The rash covered his arms and face, and it seemed to be spreading down his neck.

“Blood,” the father was looking rather grave, “Blood will wash it off.” He walked out of the garage in the direction of the dragons house.