No Frills Strawberry Stickers
by immmpact
 
Once upon a time a samurai was walking along a cliff near a deep river, whistling a warrior-like tune and generally minding his own business. Suddenly his keen senses detected movement to his right – a tiger! A giant, ferocious tiger with sharp teeth and razor claws was bounding towards him, obviously intent on having samurai tartare for lunch.
There was nowhere for the samurai to run. He took the only option he could think of, and leaped off the cliff, noticing as he did a branch sticking out from the side. “Aha!” he cried with his samurai voice and reached out to grab the branch on his way down. Securing his grip, he grinned merrily up at the slavering tiger, drooling down with a frustrated growl from the edge of the cliff.
Looking down, the samurai began to try to figure out how to climb down the cliff…and realized his samurai reflexes might not have been as good as he thought. There were no other branches, no real handholds, and a very long, long drop down to the river. Worse, at the bottom of that long, long drop he could see several alligators gathering, looking up at him with an expression of hungry anticipation remarkably similar to that of the tiger above.
This was all very distressing, not the least because tigers and alligators are not even native to Japan. However, the samurai didn’t really have the time to deal with inconsistent fauna, since right about then a couple of groundhogs crawled out of a hole near the branch he was clinging to and began gnawing at the root. They had, as noted, remarkably sharp incisors, and it looked like the alligators would be dining in relatively short order.
Just then the samurai’s keen senses noticed one other thing. Next to him, growing out of a tiny crack in the wall, was a wild strawberry plant, and hanging there was the ripest, reddest, juiciest strawberry he’d ever seen.
Without hesitation he reached over, plucked the strawberry, and took a big juicy bite.
“What a delicious strawberry!” he shouted.