#its 6000 words and not even a third done. I would love to publish it as an autumn story this year

[doyouknowhowtowaltz]

Tales from the Fruit Basket, please!

When I was at the tail end of writing The Core of the Matter, I went off on an unrelated Fruit tangent that ended up eating another story I'd been working on since 2018. It's a lovely monster, and like The Core of the Matter, its another story that's more focused on the Beast's feelings about his feelings for Enoch more than the relationship itself.

He reaches into the puncture wound and wraps his claws around the wound, and wrenches them apart until the rind cracks and comes away in two pieces. A spray of fine particulate splashes across his fur, hangs in the air and perfumes it with the smell of pumpkin. The lines of his self control fray like the fine viscera that clings to his claws. 

He sinks his claws into pulp, sifts along and closes his fist around a cluster of flat pale seeds with a squish. He pulls and the flesh of the womb stretches taught and snaps, clinging to his his wrists and fingers, spilling down like mangled tissue. For a moment he lingers there, fingers flexing and tightening against the shift of seeds in his palm, slick as scales, and then slowly he uncurls his fingers. 

With a hand dripping with tendons of pumpkin flesh he plucks up a single naked seed, turning it between his fingers, tracing out the gentle swell of its shape with an almost loving sketch of his fingers.

...

 If he had any respect for himself, if he had any restraint, he might stop there, but he is so hungry, and he has wanted for so long to do nothing but consume the happy swathe of contented town that runs like a scar through his woods, to devour the terrible feelings that welled up from within his own chest whenever he heard a strain of some folk song bent and broken to accommodate his duet, to wrap his teeth around the Harvest King and swallow him whole, maypole, catskin, town and all. 

[lady-divine-writes]

Feelings Stick

Summary: Crowley deals with his feelings for Aziraphale by writing them down in a journal, intending on keeping them a secret for as long as he can.

The journal, however, has other plans. (1110 words)

Read on AO3.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Crowley mutters, tearing through his flat, rifling through drawers and underneath sofa cushions, searching … searching …

When he comes up emptyhanded after a third full sweep, the swearing starts.

“Shit, shit, shit! Why me!? Why now!?”

He flings himself down on the sofa, hopping up onto his feet again in pain when his back hits the metal springs hiding within the cushion-less frame.

“Come on, come on, come on,” he growls, pulling hair out of his head as he attempts to remember where he last saw it. He has his suspicions. And if he’s correct, everything could go from Heaven to Hell in a handbasket in a less than …

Bzzz-bzzz. Bzzz-bzzz.

Crowley stares at the end table, at his phone vibrating its way across the glass top, the name Aziraphale displayed across the screen, white letters laid over an image of orange flame.

… no time flat.

“Shit!”

Crowley debates letting the call go to voicemail. It would be the first call from Aziraphale that he purposefully let go to voicemail ever.

He doesn’t want to do that.

Besides, he’d be a coward if he did.

Crowley hasn’t done anything wrong. Everything he wrote in his journal? 100% true. It’s the culmination of every confession Crowley ever held back, the words he didn’t say when he had the chance. When they would have mattered, could have changed things.

They would have come to light sooner or later.

He was hoping for later, of course. Not necessarily this particular Wednesday afternoon.

On the other hand, it is a nice sunny spring day outside - one of the first rare warm days they see in London this early in the year.

A perfect time to face the music.

He scoops the phone off the table before the last ring and answers the call. “Yel-lo.”

“Crowley?” Does Aziraphale sound anxious? Or is it just him?

“Hey, angel,” Crowley says, cool to counter Aziraphale’s nerves. “What can I do you for?”

“Oh, nothing really. I just … I have a question I’d like to ask you. If you don’t mind.”

“Yeah?” Crowley sighs. He knows. He just … he knows. “What is it?”

“I think …” Aziraphale swallows so hard, Crowley hears it over the line “… did you … the last time you were by the shop … did you leave … a journal? With a … with a black leather cover?”

Crowley slaps a hand to his forehead and scrubs it down his face. Shit! Mother … fucking …

Book girl!

This is all her fault!

Crowley didn’t want to start a journal. Writing his deepest thoughts and desires in a diary like a love-sick teenager?

That wasn’t him.

She’d mentioned it as a lark, as in, “What an amazing life you must have led! All the things you’ve seen! You should write them down! Maybe get them published! Even if no one believes a word of it, it could be seen as an incredible work of fiction!”

Crowley doesn’t know how it happened, when in the conversation he mentioned it. Was it after his sixth vodka shooter or his third bottle of whiskey? But before he knew it, he was a melancholy mess, droning on and on about how not a single thing he’s done in 6000 years would compare to his greatest adventure – falling in love with an angel.

For her part, book girl listened to every pathetic word, and in the end, she still felt the journal a good idea. She thought it might help him work through his feelings for Aziraphale.

How they don’t seem to be reciprocated, even after all the time they’ve spent together and everything they’ve been through.

If Crowley had a journal, he could put those thoughts in a place where he could catalog them, re-read them, sort through them rationally. Then, in the end, when he was ready, he might simply turn it over to Aziraphale, let him read it, and they could go on from there.

Or he could set it on fire and move on with his life. Whichever suited him best.

She did warn him though that things like journals tend to take on lives of their own, and if he’s not careful, it might choose to reveal itself in its own time, not his.

It seems as though that’s what it may have done, seeing as his last trip to visit Aziraphale marked the first time ever he’d taken his journal out of his flat, and when he left Aziraphale’s bookshop, he was completely sober.

So leaving it wasn’t a drunken mistake.

“Why do you think it’s mine?” Crowley asks, giving himself time to think.

“I … I don’t,” Aziraphale stutters, lying. “I … I saw the handwriting. I thought it looked familiar.”

“I take it you’ve read it then?”

“N-no.” Another lie. Usually they’re not so easy to spot. Aziraphale is a decent liar … about things he doesn’t care too much about.

“Angel …”

“I’m … I’m sorry! I didn’t recognize it! I’ve never seen it before! I didn’t read it read it if that’s any consolation. Thumbed through it to see where it belonged in my shop. I didn’t realize till …”

“It’s all right,” Crowley interrupts in the interest of putting poor Aziraphale out of his misery. “Not your fault.”

“Thank you.”

“Yeah. No problem.”

Then, silence.

Crowley figures he should go over there and pick the damned thing up but he doesn’t want to. Cat’s out of the bag. Let Aziraphale read it, cover to cover, and come to his own conclusions about where Crowley fits in his life, if there’s a place for him outside the one he occupies now. That elusive something more Crowley has been hoping for.

But maybe that’s not them. Maybe it isn’t meant to be after all.

“Crowley?”

“Yes, angel?”

“Did you … did you mean what you wrote?”

“About?”

“A-about being in love with me?” Aziraphale asks softly. “About loving me since the day we met? Dreaming about … about kissing me?”

And even though Aziraphale’s tone is difficult to decipher over the phone, even though he could very well be preparing to let Crowley down or worse, Crowley can’t help smiling hearing those words come out of Aziraphale’s mouth, imagining every break a pause he’s using to catch his breath. “Every word.”

“Oh …” Aziraphale hiccups “… my dear boy!”

“Yes?”

“Come back here! Come back here right away!”

“What? Why?” Crowley asks, the agitation in Aziraphale’s voice concerning. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Aziraphale says, the word brightened by a giddy laugh. “Come back here … and kiss me then!”

[travelworldnetwork]

By Anne Burke

2 January 2019

Around 30 years ago, Jacques-André Istel turned to his wife, Felicia Lee, and said, “We’re going to sit in the desert and think of something to do.”

Hardly an enticing proposition, but by then, Lee was surely used to her husband’s hare-brained schemes.

If I told her tomorrow we were going to Mars, she would say, ‘What do I pack?’

In 1971, at great risk to himself and his then bride-to-be, Istel piloted the couple on a round-the-world flight in a tiny, twin-engine plane that had hardly the oomph of a Chevrolet automobile. Before that, there was the whole business of convincing people to jump out of planes: in the 1950s, after returning home from the Korean War, where he served with the US Marines, Istel developed parachuting equipment and techniques that made it possible for the average Joe to leap out of an airplane at 2,500ft and land as if having tumbled from a 4ft bookcase. Soon, Americans by the thousands were enjoying the latest craze: skydiving.

Lee was a reporter for Sports Illustrated– she met Istel, by then known as ‘the father of American sport parachuting’, during an interview for a piece in the magazine – and had her own taste for adventure. “If I told her tomorrow we were going to Mars, she would say, ‘What do I pack?’,” Istel said.

View image of Thirty years ago, Jacques-André Istel and his wife, Felicia Lee, moved to the California desert to ‘think of something to do’ (Credit: Credit: Anne Burke)

You may also be interested in: • A museum measured in millimetres • A largely unsung piece of Americana • Why this US city is so absurd

And so, in the 1980s, the couple moved to the far south-east corner of California, a few miles west of Yuma, Arizona, off Interstate 8, where Istel had acquired a 2,600-acre parcel of land several decades earlier. Apart from a good aquifer, this particular patch of the Sonoran Desert had little to recommend it. But “we realised that we loved it – the calm, the beauty,” Istel said.

With nothing much around apart from an RV park and some impressively tall sand dunes, the couple’s desert refuge was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. So it made sense, at least in Istel’s fervid imagination, to put it in the middle of somewhere. In 1985, the French-born parachuting pioneer cajoled California’s Imperial County Board of Supervisors into designating a spot on his property as The Official Centre of the World. (Audacious, perhaps, but not necessarily inaccurate, given that anywhere on the Earth’s surface could be the centre.)

A landmark of such importance needed a town of its own. The following year, Istel created Felicity, which now boasts about 15 residents and its own freeway sign. Facing no opposition, Istel got himself elected mayor that same year – apparently for life.

View image of The couple founded the town of Felicity, which they had officially declared the ‘Centre of the World’ (Credit: Credit: Anne Burke)

But Istel wasn’t done with his Xanadu in the desert. He had an idea to build a granite monument with inscriptions honouring people and places important in his life – fellow parachutists, his alma mater (Princeton University in New Jersey), and his family, who had fled France during World War Two and settled in New York. His father, André, had been an advisor to Charles de Gaulle, and his mother, Yvonne, was a wartime volunteer.

Istel didn’t want just any monument. It had to be magnificent and, more importantly, it had to be something that would last far, far into the future. He hired structural engineers who came up with a design for an elongated, granite triangle that just might – “short of the planet blowing up,” Istel said – survive to the year 6000.

The triangular monument went up in 1991; it was 100ft long, about 4.5ft high, and faced with some 60 panels of polished, red granite. The durability came from what was inside: steel-reinforced concrete sunk into trenches 3ft deep.

It's where Martians will come to learn about humanity

Istel then decided he would build another monument, this one to honour US marines who fought and died in the Korean War. Then came a third monument, and a fourth, and a fifth. Today, 20 granite monuments, arranged at artful angles across the desert floor, collectively make up The Museum of History in Granite, a sort of open-air bank of knowledge for the ages. As a visitor posted on TripAdvisor, the museum is where “Martians will come to learn about humanity”.

Istel has engraved his stone triangles with tidy distillations of much of what we know about the world, from the Big Bang to former US president Barack Obama. Visitors – and they come by the thousands each year – learn about Hinduism, the eruption of Vesuvius, the Zapotecs of central Mexico, Buddhism, the birth of Jesus, Attila the Hun, Pythagoras' theorem, the behaviour of the walrus, Greek philosophy, the Gettysburg Address, the Moon landing and terrorism in contemporary times.

View image of Istel was elected mayor of Felicity in 1986 – apparently for life (Credit: Credit: Christian Lamontagne)

Despite his Ivy League background, Istel believes strongly that self-acquired knowledge “is probably the best form of education”. The idea behind these thumbnail sketches of history is to offer just enough information to whet the reader’s appetite. Most topics – even big ones – get at most a couple hundred words.

Lee handles most of the research, using reputable publishers like Oxford, Britannica and Larousse. Istel writes the text, then he and Lee go back and forth on the wording before settling on a final version. An entry titled ‘Interesting Times’ went through 59 drafts. Once the text is ready, professional engravers get to work, often toiling in the glow of lamplight under a night sky to escape the brutal desert heat. To accompany the text, artists etch illustrations into the hard stone panels.

The museum can’t cover everything, so “you pick and choose things that are interesting,” Istel said. He often groups related items into a single theme. The Code of Hammurabi and the Ten Commandments appear under ‘Early Concepts of Law’. The American concept of ‘Manifest Destiny’ is mentioned on a panel called ‘Exploring and Expanding’, along with the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Some topics are of personal interest to Istel – parachuting gets ample space – while other topics come as suggestions from others. Lee came up with the idea for a panel on the ‘Great Seal of the United States’, the US’ official coat of arms.

View image of Since 1991, Istel has erected 20 granite monuments depicting the history of the world (Credit: Credit: Anne Burke)

Some of the inscriptions are amusing, if little more. For example, in 1809, US president James Madison proposed a cabinet post of Secretary of Beer. Hamburgers “account for nearly 60% of all sandwiches eaten”. The grizzly in California’s original Bear Republic flag “looked more like a pig than a bear”. The typical Wild West cowboy was “frequently hundreds of miles from the nearest bar or woman”. The TV mute button, which Istel considers “one of the world’s great inventions”, gets a mention.

Istel aims for objectivity and is a stickler for accuracy. But given that even reputable sources will disagree on certain points, it’s a difficult challenge. “The answer is, you do the best you can,” Istel said.

The museum’s official season runs during the cooler months. From the day after Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday in November) through the end of March, visitors can join a 15-minute tour led by a volunteer docent, watch a short video about the museum or grab a bite at the small restaurant. During the rest of the year, the museum is open, but only for self-guided tours.

View image of Etched by hand, the panels at the Museum of History in Granite portray everything from the Bing Bang to the Moon landing (Credit: Credit: Anne Burke)

Istel’s property is also dotted with pieces of art and architecture that seemingly have little to do with anything, but add a bit of absurdist fun. A 25ft section of the original spiral staircase from the Eiffel Tower rises incongruously into the desert sky. A bronze sculptural replica of Michelangelo’s ‘Arm of God’, from the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, acts as the gnomon of a sundial.

There is also a hollow, 21ft pink-granite pyramid, inside which is a metal plaque that marks the centre of the world. A $2 fee, on top of the museum’s regular admission of $3 per person, entitles visitors to a certificate attesting to having stood on the exact spot.

The tallest and most striking element on the property is a little white chapel that sits poetically atop a 35ft earthen hill. Istel is not particularly religious, but he thought it fitting to install the chapel if for no other reason than to “keep us on our good behaviour”.

Istel and Lee live alongside the museum in a lovely, light-filled house with big windows that look out on chocolate-coloured mountains. There’s a library stocked with leather-bound volumes and a piano that Lee plays. Istel serves guests fizzy water – wine if they prefer – in crystal glasses.

View image of Istel believes that self-acquired knowledge is one of the best forms of education (Credit: Credit: Anne Burke)

Istel has made plans in his estate for the museum and all that surrounds it. Yet – as he approaches his 90th birthday – he has no plans of slowing down.

The museum is far from complete. Dozens of blank granite panels await text and illustrations. There is also a new freeway sign to be installed, and the never-ending task of keeping up with online reviews. Istel responds to each – even the mean ones – with unfailing politeness.

May distant descendants, perhaps far from planet Earth, view our collective history with understanding and affection

If residents of other worlds do indeed visit the museum one day, Istel would not be particularly surprised. He believes that humans will one day colonise other planets and eventually stars, so it’s not inconceivable that they could, at some point, return to Earth. One granite panel bears a big question mark, along with this inscription:

“May distant descendants, perhaps far from planet Earth, view our collective history with understanding and affection.”

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