Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls by Danielle Wood

deep dimple for its stem. The solitary pear would sit, upright, to the left, keeping a respectful distance from the pitcher and the family of apples. But when Eve assembled the scene, just as she had imagined it, she saw immediately that there was a problem with the pear.
    The pear was all wrong. One of the smooth, brown-skinned varieties of pear, it sat over to one side looking — in comparison with the vibrant apples — two dimensional and lifeless. Brown on brown just didn’t work. What was needed, clearly, was a green pear. A fresh pear. A knobbly pear. One that would stand up for itself with its bright waxy skin, with bumps like hard, misplaced buttocks and breasts. Eve looked at her watch. She could make it to town and back in an hour and a half. Tops. Two if she had a quick bite of lunch while she was there.
    When she returned, Eve picked out the greenest and knobbliest of the pears in a kilo bag and rested it on its base a few inches from the pewter pitcher. She stood back, by her easel, upon which her canvas was stretched. And blank. She observed her still life study in the centre of the table. The colours harmonised, the composition was in perfect balance. It was just right. It was five o’clock.
    On the fourth day, Eve sat at her easel. She got up and walked around the room. She sat at her easel. She got up and made herself a cup of tea. Herbal. She sat at her easel. She sighed. Her tin of Derwent Watercolour pencils caught her eye. It had been months since she last used them, and when she opened the tin and lifted out the top tray she could see immediately that the pencils were out of order. She emptied them onto the table beside the still life ensemble and sorted them by number until she had a pleasing rainbow where there had been a jumble of shades. Some of her colours — number sixty-two, Burnt Sienna, and number fifty-six, Raw Umber — were now down to half-size. Others — like number thirty-seven, Oriental Blue, and number twenty-three, Imperial Purple — were still as tall as they were when brand-new. But even many of the lesser-used ones were quite blunt. And so she took up her metal pencil sharpener and began. At number one, Zinc Yellow.
    She was up to number forty-one, Jade Green, when she heard the sound of a car in the driveway. Through the window she saw coming to a standstill the decrepit red mini with a stoved-in driver’s side door that belonged to her friend Rosie. (Yes, that would be me, having made the difficult decision to cut Friday’s media ethics lecture in favour of a drive in the country. She watched as I crawled out of the passenger-side door and hefted a wicker picnic basket — its gingham-covered lid concealing two bottles of cheap plonk — out of the back seat.)
    ‘Rosie …’ she started.
    ‘Don’t look at me like that. You can stop long enough to eat lunch.’
    ‘ Lunch ?’
    ‘Evie, it’s one thirty.’
    Eve took the basket, carried it into the house and placed it on the table where she thought it might conceal the pile of shavings edged with every colour of two-thirds of a rainbow. No such luck.
    ‘I …um,’ Eve said, trying to conjure up a justification.
    ‘Oh dear. That bad?’
    On the fifth day, Eve lost her confidence in the Cox’s Orange Pippin. What she had wanted for the apple occupying that position in her painting — what she had seen when she had dreamed it — was the kind of luminous apple painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder in the tree above the auburn heads of his Adam and Eve .
    Eve could picture almost every detail of the Cranach in her mind. She could conjure Eve’s naked body, lumpy as her own knobbled pear. She could see Adam’s befuddled scratching of his head, the zoo of placid animals at his feet and the serpent bending into a reverse S against the tree trunk. But although she could remember the apples bursting like stars all over the canopy of leaves, and although she could remember their gorgeous shades of gold and blood orange, she