Clementine and the face mask

A CLEMENTINE that once lived in a grocery store was always fragrant, and everybody was jealous of her for her fine smell.

One autumn day, however, and as the weather got colder and the winds howled in the garden, our good Clementine was shocked to see that an olive with which she used to hang out had wrinkled and fallen from the tree.

“Will this be my fate too?”, asked our good Clementine, trembling with fear in the thought that she would lose her natural smell and her skin would get wrinkles.

“Just like all of us, as nothing lasts forever”, the other olives of the tree told her. Shocked, she started thinking of ways to stay forever young.

After a thorough search, she found a store with all sorts of cosmetics and face creams. As soon as she finished trying all of them, she bought only the best, which also happened to be the most expensive, and spent all her money on them. Much to her surprise, however, she saw no improvement during the next days, and her skin kept wrinkling.

Then, she met the conceited radish, who thought he knew everything about medicine, He made a fool of her by selling her yoghurt for a face cream.

So, he told her: “I have a cream to offer to you from a Chinese sage. It will cost you extra, but the results are guaranteed”. Our good Clementine jumped with joy to hear it. She gave him all her money, totally unsuspecting that it was yoghurt she was buying and not some cream with magic ingredients.

As soon as she took it, she rubbed her face, and after placing two pieces of cucumber to cover her eyes, she lay down to sunbathe. The other fruit and vegetables then, after smelling the yoghurt, burst into laughter. “What a pity, to see you end up being fooled by the radish who sold you… yoghurt for a cream!”. Yet, she wouldn’t hear a word, and only waited for the face mask to act so as to have the final laugh.

After a few minutes, however, the wild wind blew, taking the pieces of cucumber away from her eyes. Fearful, she ran after them in the garden, but the more she ran, the further the wind blew them away. She ended up running many kilometers before she finally managed to collect them from the ground, yet until that time there was no yoghurt left on her face.

“And  now?          Will  I        get    wrinkles     and   smell bad?”, wondered our good Clementine and burst into tears.

No sooner had she finished the phrase, and a housewife walked through the garden who picked her up, filled her nostrils with the Clementine's beautiful smell, and took her to her house where she turned her into compote so she would preserve her fine odor forever.