Author’s Summary:
Princess Cassandra of Troy muses about apples.
Apples were a common fruit among the Greeks and the
Trojans. Both countries ate them. Cassandra could see how the red color in
apples was the same color as blood. Crisp and delicious did apples taste to her
in her mouth when she devoured them. She enjoyed eating apples alongside bread,
chunks of meat, and different other kinds of fruit to eat and fine wine to drink
at meals. To end up hearing the sound of the crunch of the apple she ate under
her teeth and feel the sweet stickiness of the apples on her fingers. To get the juice from the apple to run down
the sides of her mouth and her have to wipe the juice away with her hand. How
Cassandra loved apples.
How Cassandra hated apples with the same passion as
she loved them.
It was ironic to Cassandra how apples were able to
help people to sustain life by eating the fruit to get the necessary
nourishment that they needed to survive could also kill people. Basic common
sense proved to her that apples brought both life and death in their wake.
People could choke to death on apple seeds or die from attempting to eat the
core of apples. Apples did taste sweet to people like most unnoticeable lethal
poisons do, but apples ended up being a deadly fruit.
Cassandra knew that apples were the most deadly in
the hands of gods and goddesses. The gods and goddesses did not accept Eris the
Goddess of Discord for who she was, cared nothing for her, and despised her for
her troublemaking ways and Eris ended up proving that golden apples were the
deadliest of all to mortals. Furious over not being invited to the wedding of
Peleus and the sea nymph Thetis, she threw a golden apple marked “to the
fairest” among the wedding guests to make strife. She got the women –both
goddesses and mortal women alike—to fight over who was the recipient of the
golden apple until only Aphrodite the Goddess of Love and Beauty, Athena the Goddess
of Wisdom, and Hera the Goddess of Marriage, the wife of Zeus, and Queen of the
Gods quarreled over it. Zeus had Hermes lead the three divine goddesses to
Mount Ida where Cassandra’s own brother Paris lived as a shepherd tending to
his flocks to judge over their contest for the ownership of the golden apple. Aphrodite had offered Paris the most
beautiful woman in the world to be his bride if he choose her as the fairest,
Athena had pledged to give him skill in battle and wisdom if he decided to
choose her as the one who was the fairest, and Hera had promised to make him
lord over all Asia if he gave the golden apple to her. It was Paris’s choice to
choose Aphrodite as the fairest without hesitation in return for her giving him
the most beautiful woman in the world Helen of Sparta to be his bride that would
bring about the Trojan War between the Greeks and the Trojans that would last
for ten long years and cause the destruction of Troy just as Cassandra had
foreseen it to be.
She found it ironic that all of what she had
foreseen would come to pass because of a golden apple.
The deadliest fruit of all to Cassandra are apples.
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