#white tapered columns

[sharinghopesanddreams]

Fiberboard in Chicago Large, elegant exterior shot of a blue, two-story concrete fiberboard home with a hip roof and shingles.

[samconcepcion]

Detroit Craftsman Exterior With a shingle roof and a gray roof, this large arts and crafts-style two-story home's exterior is made of concrete, fiberboard, and clapboard.

[mllekurtz]

Fox's Claw

aka the Shadowgast Witcher AU part 2

Prologue

Morning came like drops of honey in warm milk. The golden sunlight filtering through the curtains traced slanted columns of amber in the room, highlighting the motes of dust that danced in and out of them. Caleb blinked, not asleep nor awake, surfacing from a dreamless sleep. Neither the dust, nor the room nor the sunlight were real, at least not in the conventional sense. Still, they didn’t feel more unreal than the arm slung across Caleb’s chest, which, on the other hand, wasn’t the result of some creative, intricate spell-work. His eyes followed the downy curve of a slim bicep, skimmed over the soft swell of a shoulder and finally landed on mussed white hair. He was aware of the pressure of a round cheekbone on his own bony shoulder (the sharpness of which was often complained about, but never renounced). The moist sensation of drool on his skin was charming, although he could imagine the horrified reaction if he ever voiced this thought. He turned his head to press a lazy kiss on the crown of that head, inhaling a ghost of lavender and rosemary. A tapered ear flicked sluggishly, but Essek didn’t move. “I know you’re awake,” Caleb murmured. The sun wouldn’t be up otherwise.

Read the rest of the prologue and subscribe to the fic 💫 here 💫

[whencyclopedia]

Horyuji

The Horyuji Temple near Nara in Japan was founded in 607 CE by Prince Shotoku and is the only surviving Buddhist monastery from the Asuka Period in its original state. The complex, consisting of 48 listed buildings including a 5-storey pagoda, has the oldest wooden buildings in Japan. Within the temples are many ancient Buddhist sculptures including some of the oldest bronze and wood figures produced by Japanese sculptors. In 1993 CE the temple complex became the country's first UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Foundation & Design

The Horyuji Temple was founded during the reign of Prince Shotoku (594-622 CE), regent to his aunt, Empress Suiko. Shotoku helped spread Buddhism in Japan, which had arrived via Korea in the mid-6th century CE. He oversaw the construction of many Buddhist temples, among them Shitennoji (593 CE) and Hokoji (596 CE), but Horyuji is the only one to have survived in its original state. The site was not without its problems for several buildings burnt down c. 670 CE but were then rebuilt so that by 710 CE it had regained its former glory. The historian E. F. Fenollosa suggests that the outer gate, pagoda, and Great Hall escaped the fire. The site is divided into two connecting precincts, the Sai-in (Western) and slightly later To-in (Eastern), both of which have their paving covered in white sand and are enclosed within walls to separate them from the non-sacred outer world.

Horyuji's wooden buildings, rare examples of early East Asian architecture, are the oldest such structures in Japan. Features typical of Asuka Period (538-710 CE) architecture include double terrace platforms on which the buildings stand, columns which curve slightly and taper as they rise so as to appear perfectly straight at a distance (entasis), columns topped by wooden block plates to bear the weight of the heavy tiled roofs, and wooden brackets decorated with cloud designs, again to aid in load-bearing. The site benefitted from major restoration works in 1374 CE, 1603 CE, and in the mid-20th century CE.

Continue reading...

[thee-morrigan]

the words you're too scared to say

attachment theory, chapter 11 The Wayhaven Chronicles Nate Sewell/Holland Townsend rated M

Excerpt:

Summer melted away with a slow, easy slide, candle wax dripping and cooling along the smooth column of a long, white taper. The trees turned yellow, gold, orange. Another month gone, and the weather had begun to change, the air taking on a bite, a briskness. Officially fall, now: the nights were growing steadily colder, the air crisp and tart-sharp as the first bite of a perfectly ripe green apple, and the sky had taken on that crystalline brilliance, that startling, bright clarity that only autumn skies seem to possess. (As if everything was sharper, somehow. Clearer. As if the world had become somehow clearer, cleaner.) And Holland had never been one for the summer months. Had always felt like they were a little too hazy-thick, bright in the wrong ways. Too hot and too long, an endless taffy-stretch of days spent sweltering in the sticky-wet heat, sun beating down on everything, relentless and oppressive and draining, where everything was just too fucking much. But this summer, the days had slipped by far too quickly, and the nights even more so. (And the nights had been...) There hadn't been enough time, she thought. Hadn't been nearly enough of him. Summer, for once, had been too short and too little. For the first time she could remember, Holland longed for more of summer's relentless sprawl. (And she thought: There will never be enough of Nate, for as long as I live.) Another month gone. And Holland wondered if they would run out of time before she worked up the courage to tell him that she— well. That he meant more than she’d intended for him to mean.

continue on ao3

[kryptid-writes]

Chapter 9 - Cat's Out

The secret is out and the tension reaches a boiling point.

(2.6k)

The beautiful symphony of music plays, unlike anything I've heard before. It’s soft but powerful, the notes harmonizing and blending together in the most exquisite way, filling me with a sense of peace. 

I find myself dressed in a beautiful flowing white gown, adorned with tiny diamonds that sparkle under the bright light shining from the crystal chandelier that hangs above us in the empty ballroom. 

The elegant ballroom is filled with exquisite architecture that’s reminiscent of a fairytale. The marbled walls are lined with twisting golden engravings creating elegant designs. The white and gray columns tower over us, unique shapes and symbols carved into the stone. But perhaps the most stunning part of it all is the dynamic renaissance painting across the ceiling. Pastel depictions of angels and the peaceful grace of Heaven clashing against the dark armies of demons and black hounds of Hell. Among all the chaos is the battle of Micheal and Lucifer, the story I study like gospel.

Lucifer wears a matching three piece suit in a pristine white color that brings out the deep red of his eyes. His hair neatly brushed back and the usual blood that splatters his body is scrubbed completely clean.

I must admit, for a man that’s never seemed to care about his appearance before, he sure cleans up nice.

With my hand intertwined in his, we sway together, the click of shoes against the old polished wood echoing around. His extravagant wings flow to the melody and hold me close as we spin in coordinated circles. Our bodies press together, that wonderful electric feeling humming between us, pulling us ever closer. I press my face against his chest, breathing in his enticing smell. 

He rests his head on the top of mine and hums along to the music, occasionally singing a quiet word of Enochian. His hand rests on the small of my back and moves up to caress the feathers of my petite wings.

I suck in a breath of air as he reaches the cusp of my injured wing, wisps of pain surging through me.

With a touch of his fingers, a white light shines through and the wound is instantly healed, the pain fading rapidly and leaving a cool sensation behind.

“What happened my beloved?” He asks, placing a tender kiss on the top of my hair.

Lucifer always seems to know more about me then he lets on, but I play along with his little game regardless.

 “Did Dean do something to you?” He tilts my head to meet his gaze. “I swear to dad, I will make him wish he was never born!” His eyes burn with passion.

“No!” I blurt out. I rest my hand on his chest, trying to calm his sudden temper.

“Are you sure? Because I was really looking forward to finally smiting that petulant bug.” His lips twist into a mischievous smile at the thought.

“Dean didn’t do anything,” My eyes fall to the chestnut wooden floor, avoiding his eye contact. “I did this to myself,” my voice tapers off to a hushed whisper.

“Why?” He asks, his voice dripping with hurt, despite knowing the answer already.

“Because I don’t want to be an angel, Lucifer! I want to be me!” Hot tears brim my eyes, threatening to spill at any second.

“Oh, Darling.” He cups my face in his hands, wrapping his large white wings around us, shielding me from the light that has suddenly become all too bright. “This is your true form. This is who you were always meant to be.” He tenderly kisses my forehead.

I shake my head, utterly conflicted by the rush of emotions. I meet his gaze with wide eyes. The tears break free, racing down my cheeks.

“You are my fathers finest creation.” He wipes my tears away with his thumbs. “I didn’t think it possible that you could be any more beautiful, yet here you are my love,” he coos, running his eyes over every inch of me, admiring me as if I were the forbidden apple in the garden of eden. He pulls me into his warm embrace, the magnetic feeling courses through me, I feel as if I'm floating on a cloud.

“Oh, Luce,” I sigh into his chest.

“We’ll be reunited very soon and you’ll see why it must be this way,” he promises, running his fingers through my delicate feathers.

I close my eyes at the feeling and find myself fading from the realm of dreams.

------------------------------------------------------------

The soft murmurs of voices down the hall pulls me out of my peaceful dream that my mind scrambles to hold on to, desperate to return. 

After a minute of resistance, I stretch my arms far above my head and yawn, feeling refreshed after a good night of sleep. Yesterday's events must have really taken a lot out of me. Looking to my left, I notice the messy nest of sheets and pillows where Dean Winchester once slept, holding me in his arms. The memory leaves a soft smile on my face.

I throw the silk sheets off of me and stand from the bed, leaving my comfortable paradise. I grab a flannel off the floor and attempt to put it on, but it gets stuck above my wings, leaving me still completely exposed. I huff and tear at the threads in the back, carelessly ripping open two uneven holes. I constrict my wings into uncomfortable angles and force them through the mangled shirt. This angel business is bound to affect my life in many unforeseen ways.

I step out of my room and tiptoe down the hallway that leads to the library. As I grow nearer, the three familiar voices become more clear. I stop and press my body against the cold tile wall, hiding just out of sight and listen intently to their conversation.

“I’m telling you man, something is seriously wrong,” Dean warns in a hushed volume.

 I can hear him nervously pacing back and forth, his hurried footsteps giving him away.

“You should’ve seen what she was doing to herself! I’ve never seen anything like it!”

“So, what? You think it’s some sort of depression or dysmorphia?” Sam asks in confusion.

“Could be. It’s quite a drastic change,” Dean pauses for a second, “I mean you remember what it felt like losing your angel mojo and becoming human, right?” 

“Yes, it was certainly distressing,” Castiel replies in his usual monotone voice.

“I’m… fine,” I say weakly, interrupting their conversation and stepping into the light. I clutch my hands together, nervously picking at the cuticles of my nails. I try to fold my wings behind my back in a pitiful attempt to hide them, but at this point they’re too large to disguise. I can’t help but feel self conscious as their undivided attention is directed towards me.

“Y/N,” Deans gasps, eyes wide and mouth agape, resembling a deer caught in headlights.

“Um, good morning,” Sam says, his face painted in surprise. His eyes scan over my form, unable to look away from my wilted wings, particularly the mutilated one wrapped in bandages.

“Look, I had to tell them,” Dean admits in shame, scratching the back of his neck. “I’m just worried about you, is all,” his voice drops to a softer, concerned tone. 

“It’s okay Dean,” I assure him, swallowing the betrayal I felt deep down. “But really, I'm fine,” I emphasize the last two words, being sure to get my point across. My eyes flick over to the other men, they look back at me with doubt.

“You should let Sammy take a look at the wound, he’s always been better at this kinda thing than me.” Dean walks to my side, putting a comforting hand on my shoulder and guiding me to sit at the table.

I sink into the chair but sulk away from his touch. As much as I've grown to care for Dean, I can’t help but feel a twinge of resentment. It saddens me that someone I thought I could trust would rat me out so quickly. But I suppose all I was doing is delaying the inevitable, they would have found out one way or another.

Dean pulls his hand back, receiving the message loud and clear.

“Right,” Sam says and stands from his seat. His eyes still locked on my wings, undoubtedly having a difficult time peeling his eyes away. Without another word, he dashes out of the library.

The room goes uncomfortably silent, the awkward tension hanging in the air. 

Dean leans back against the table, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, clearly feeling a sense of guilt. 

I shift uncomfortably in my chair, my arms crossed and mind racing.

Castiel on the other hand, stands attentively on the other side of the table, his stare in my direction unrelenting.

Sam quickly returns with a bottle of whiskey and a small white towel. He pulls a chair out, the obnoxious scrape of wood breaking the silence. He sits across from me and clears his throat.

I frill out my injured wing, stretching it so that Sam may remove the bandage and inspect the wound.

He furrows his brows and carefully unwraps the damaged area. His eyes narrow and the bloody bandage falls to the ground. “It’s… healed?” His face scrunches up in confusion. His soft brown eyes shifting from my wings, back to Dean and Castiel. 

“No, it was right there, I stitched it up myself!” Dean huffs, stepping forward. He hovers over me to get a closer look at the wing, running a finger over the area that was previously mutilated. His expression is a mix of surprise and confusion.

I close my eyes at his touch, doing my best to suppress the blissful feeling that burns in my body. “Hm,” I respond, looking at the perfectly restored wing. I shift it back and forth, the pain completely gone.

Dean throws his hands up, bewildered at my response.

“Hm? That’s all you have to say?” He shouts at me and runs a hand through his hair in frustration.

I shoot a spiteful glare at him, annoyed by his temper.

“It’s possible that her newly found angel grace may have healed the injury overnight,” Castiel chimes in. He steps closer and leans over the table intently, placing his calloused hands on the worn wood.

“It’s not my grace,” I say quietly, my gaze falling to the floor. 

“What the Hell is that supposed to mean?” Dean barks, clearly fed up with the lack of answers.

“Lucifer… he healed me last night in my dream,” I admit, mentally preparing myself for the backlash I have deliberately been avoiding.

“He’s still communicating with you through your dreams?” Sam questions, his tone soft, much more understanding than his brothers. There’s no question that he’s the more compassionate of the two.

“Great! Well that’s just fantastic!” He roars, his voice a mix of sarcasm and anger. He bounds out of the chair and hastily throws a book that was sitting upon the table, in anger. It hits the wall with a crack and falls to the floor, ripped pages fluttering to the ground, landing in a messy pile. “Were you planning on telling us this anytime soon?” His face flushes red in rage and clenches his fists into tight balls.

I shrug, not paying mind to his childish outburst. 

“So, what? You’re buddy buddy with the devil now?!” He yells, taking several steps towards me with no regard for my personal space.

“I NEVER SAID THAT!” I bolt up from my chair. It tips backwards and hits the floor with a loud bang. I look up at him, his face just inches from mine. Our eyes lock in an intense staring contest, waiting for the other to break.

“Alright!” Sam intervenes, stepping between us. “Take a walk!” He snaps at Dean, giving him a light push to the chest.

Dean furrows his brows at Sam and gives me one final resentful glare before turning on his heels and storming out of the room, grumbling angrily to himself on the way out.

I let out a breath that I didn’t realize I was holding in. I close my eyes, getting my emotions under control, something Dean seems incapable of.

Sam takes a seat and runs his hand down his face, stopping to pinch the bridge of his nose, the stress evidently getting to him.

Castiel straightens up and stands still like a statue, looking unphased as usual. The scruffy angel resigns to silence.

“Look,” Sam says, gesturing for me to take the seat next to him. “We’re just a little frustrated you’ve been hiding this stuff from us,” his voice is calm and collected. 

It takes the edge off of my anger and I relax into the back of the chair, the wood digging into my back. “I’m sorry Sam,” I sigh. “I’m just ashamed that he has this hold on me that I just can’t seem to shake. I didn’t want to concern you.”

He nods his head in understanding. “He’s the devil, a master manipulator, and he’s a natural at getting inside people's heads. Trust me, I know,” he chuckles like it’s some sort of inside joke. Sam silently shakes his head, looking as if he’s recalling some distant memories.

“But these things,” I resentfully gesture to my wings. “I’m a full blown freak!”

“You’re not a freak,” Sam states in a stern voice. “I know why you feel that way, but it’s far from the truth Y/N.” He places his large hand on mine that rests upon the table in a friendly gesture.

“Look at me Sam! These things are an abomination,” I retort, hanging my head in shame.

“Your wings are nothing to be ashamed of,” Castiel interjects, breaking his stoic silence.

I lift my head and look in his direction, suddenly reminded of his presence. He had been so quiet and still that I completely forgot he was here at all.

“They’re a sign of beauty and grace,” he assures, his pensive blue eyes meeting mine. “You are beautiful,” he says in full seriousness, his face softening just a little.

I’m seriously taken aback by his words. A compliment is the last thing I'd expect from Castiel, even Sam looks shocked. “Thank you Castiel.” I’m unable to conceal the blush that creeps upon my face.

“Hey Cas,” Sam asks, changing the direction of the conversation. “How come we’re able to see her wings but not yours?” 

“I’m not entirely sure, but it likely has something to do with the fact that Y/N is partially human. Perhaps she is unable to conceal them the same way a natural angel can.”

“Wow, my luck just keeps getting better,” I reply sarcastically.

Castiel tilts his head in confusion. It seems that to some angels, sarcasm is a foreign concept.

“That’s probably why they look like this,” I say bitterly. “Short and stubby. Even my feathers are a rugged mess.”

Castiel frowns at this and Sam gives my hand a light squeeze.

“I mean compared to Lucifer's big majestic wings, these puny things are nothing,” I sigh.

Castiel’s head shoots up, his brows furrowed and face an unreadable expression. “You can see Lucifer’s wings?” He asks, seemingly caught off guard by this.

“Um… yeah?”

He straightens his posture, suddenly looking stiff and worried. His brows furrow and eyes flit back and forth, lost in thought.

“Cas?” Sam questions suspiciously.

“I believe I have a lead.” The sound of ruffling feathers echoes off the walls as he promptly disappears. 

His reaction leaves me with more questions than answers, an uneasy feeling settling in my stomach.

Sam and I look at eachother, exchanging worried glances.

Whether he admits it or not, Castiel is hiding something.

Series Masterlist

Full Masterlist

[darkdemeter]

FLOWERS FROM MY LOVER

CUT PROLOGUE TURNED TEASER EXCERPT FROM LOVERS IN EDEN CHAPTER 2, COMING SOON...

NOTIFICATION LIST

@nsilvers-personal-treasury

Her heart’s desire. Somewhere that humanity would be protected from the reaches of Heaven, Hell and the Council. Fury sets upon a journey across the cosmos, a liquid landscape of starlight and darkened, inky oceans that swirl in a calming abyss that hum with a beating force. It drones in her ears peacefully. The humans charged under her guardianship venture with her, following her. She leads the way to their new home. But where? 

She musters images of serenity. Somewhere like earth. Green and hospitable, a safe where the dirt doesn’t stir with broken ash upon a mere touch but insead, the soil is rich with growth and can supply an abundance of crops. A haven where they can rest themselves and gather their strength, forge the foundations of their home to build their life anew and reclaim their numbers. 

But all thoughts of such a wonderful place are banished. Overtaken by the distorted and cruel memories of her past. Lands of rolling, green pastures turn to barren wastes, smoke travels in winding spirals until they come together as a large, looming cloud above without promise of anything else but a polluted visage of darkness. All the places she wanted to be safe weren’t good enough. Haunted by the past, she cannot find that safe haven and she, along with the ethereal energies that go with her, begin to falter in their travels. 

Ugh, why is this so hard? Why can’t I find somewhere safe for them?

Her heart pounds hard in the cavern of her chest. She begins to rush through the process, impatient that for once, she tries to do the right thing only to fail. Was she truly suited for this purpose, to serve as their protector? 

Fury.

Her eyes pry open quickly, widened. Someone or something spoke to– no, through her. Fury feels her body become weightless in the grasp of whatever power that guides her. She willingly chooses to follow it instead of being led like some dog. The souls of the humans gather close to her,  following her direction with clinging desperation to not get lost. To not be left behind.

It’s safe here. Come. 

Fury’s body succumbs to the shudder that pulses through her body, leaving her nauseous and weak. Her eyes become heavy, drooping as the calm, soft lull of the voice pulls her through the white light at the end of the tunnel where the twinkling lights of stars and dancing halos fuse closely together. 

Pulled through and vision covered entirely, her head falls back, her hair fluttering in a column of fiery, tapering locks. 

She descends slowly, the phantom hold she feels around her carefully moves to lower her into a bed of a softened texture. It caresses her skin with a comforting tenderness. Her eyes are so heavy. Even when she tries to keep them open, to will herself to stand up and see to the humans in her care, her body has grown exhausted. 

She feels warm under the glowing pale of the sun that paints over her. The scented perfume of flowers fills her senses and further blankets her with promise. This place is safe. This is her heart’s desire. She hasn’t even seen a single detail of this world and yet she knows it is right. It is all that the humans will need. Perhaps what she and her brothers will need, if they ever see each other again…

How she yearns to be with her brothers and finally to be united together. She has seen the error of her selfish wants. Lust had been right, what it was she lusted for was a sin all her own. She continues to learn from her mistakes but some feel incapable of mending. 

I’m so tired…

Her mouth cranes open to yawn, her cheek turning inward to the touch of the lily petals. The shadow that hovers over her is unseen by her, finally able to rest peacefully in this bed of flowers. This serene home. 

“Welcome home, Fury. Sleep now… you have earned it.”

Fingers tethered to a gentle hand move down to brush a stream of hair from Fury’s face. An even kinder gaze watches her, fond and hopeful that the Horseman may finally find her respite here. A breeze envelops the field of lilies, their petals lean with a swaying dance and Fury’s breath slows, her heart no longer rapping hard and instead settles. 

Wherever this new home is, it is nice. Beautiful. She hopes her brothers will get to see it soon. 

This unseen form wanders, steps adrift to leave Fury to sleep amidst the flowery meadow. The humans returned to their physical bodies, gasping and eyes widened, the spiritual verse uncontained by a physical vessel one that they do not experience often. 

Silently, the host that resides in this world as its caretaker lifts a finger to rest on the curve of her lips, inaudibly swearing the humans to secrecy. 

Her identity will be revealed… all in due time. Until then, she turns on a wayward path towards the half bending sun that sets upon the horizon. The veiling whites of her robes flutter in the wind, drawing around her body gracefully. Her bare feet move along slowly, her eyes shimmer with a warm glisten and she continues to smile. In her embrace, she nurses a bundle of freshly plucked lilies, the dark smears of ash and decay fading away and ready for their planting among the many in the field. 

“Thank you for the flowers, my love.”

[old-folks-shortcake-date]

Old Fashioned Murder

A Columbo episode refashioned to contain Kim Kitsuragi

Chapter One

Of course this part of Revachol West was called Eminent Domain: the 8/81 raised motorway loomed directly above it. The giant concrete columns towered over wooden houses and telephone poles. Wires laced the edge of the motorway in a taut line, a resting place for the birds, with more wires drooping beneath. Each column connected to the one opposite it with a beam above the 8/81 while houses directly beneath had long since lost their sunlight in the heavy shadow. The houses all faced the street with the same dingy brown wood. A patrol vehicle was parked on the street: a boxy blue motor carriage tinged with rust sitting between tall, narrow wheels – the Coupris 40, precinct number and a diagonal white stripe painted on its side. Beside it, shorter, hunched forward, a Coupris Kineema with smaller wheels in the front and a white stripe down the blue side, with a trapezoidal windshield in the front granting a view to the steering levers. It had just growled to a stop. Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi stepped out onto a slushy street, snow melting with the spring. A man in Couron, Dr. Tim Schaeffer, had called in after discovering a concerning message from his brother Milton at around six in the morning. So the Revachol Citizens Militia stopped by the room Milton Schaeffer rented in one of the houses on this block to check in on him.

Kitsuragi knocked on the door. Neither police man wore a uniform: Lieutenant Kitsuragi in his orange aerostatic bomber jacket, white shirt, dark green cargo pants tapered at the calf above his black leather boots. He was a middle aged man with a slight build who wore red gloves and had on glasses. He kept his short black hair combed back on top and trimmed short on the sides and in the back. Beside him, Sergeant McGill wore a dark gray suit, a darker tie, and a white shirt. He was a Black man in his mid thirties, easily taller than the lieutenant, with short black hair, heavy eyebrows and a lean face. Some minutes had passed since Kitsuragi knocked so he knocked again, a bit louder this time.

“I’ll be right there!” came a woman’s voice, muffled through the door. “Who is it?”

“The police, Madam,” replied Kitsuragi.

The landlady opened the door wearing a bath robe over pajamas, her graying brown hair unkempt. She tried combing it into place with her fingers and their visit had clearly woken her from bed. “Hello? What is it?”

Kitsuragi introduced himself and McGill.

“Good morning, Madam,” said McGill.

“We are just checking if Mr. Milton Schaeffer is home. He’s not in any trouble, we hope. His brother is concerned,” explained Kitsuragi.

“Millie,” introduce the woman. She made no move to let them in and leaned on the doorway, blocking it. “Well he never came home and I didn’t see him all day yesterday.”

“May we check his room?” asked Kitsuragi.

“Why?” she asked.

“I told you why,” Kitsuragi said. “His brother thinks something might have happened to him.”

Millie sighed and reluctantly stepped aside.

“Thank you, Madam,” Kitsuragi said.

“Thank you,” added McGill.

They walked into the dim house and Millie shepherded them directly to Schaeffer’s room.

“When you find him, I’m still waiting on that rent,” Millie told them irritably.

Kitsuragi knocked on the door. “Mr. Schaeffer?” There was no response.

“I told you he’s not here,” Millie muttered.

McGill and Kitsuragi exchanged a quick glance, then McGill knocked before opening the door. Inside they found the meagerly furnished room of a poor bachelor. There were rectangular dents in the carpet where something used to be.

“What was here?” asked McGill.

“I don’t remember. He pawned some things recently. He told me he’d gotten a job at some museum or whatever last time I saw him. Don’t think he had anything left to pawn. Gambler,” explained Millie. “When you find him, you remember to tell him I need that rent last week.” She wandered off and in a moment they heard the gurgle of a coffee maker.

“I’ll start an inventory, see if anything is missing,” said McGill.

“While I appreciate your initiative, what would we compare that inventory to? We would have to know what was here originally to tell if there was anything missing,” Kitsuragi replied in a low voice.

“Oh, yes. You do have a point.”

“We can still search his things and see what’s here.”

“Yes, of course.”

They meticulously went through the room, which didn’t take very long as it wasn’t a very big room and there was hardly anything in it: just a dresser and a bed, a few dirty clothes on the floor, a stack of paperbacks, and so forth.

----------

After their search, they drove to the seven storey buildings and suburbs of Grand Couron. A dingy gray Peugeot 403 Cabriolet had already parked on the curb in front of one of the lovely suburban houses. It was a small, sloped motor carriage with pronounced fenders and a longer hood than the Coupris.

The massive black double doors led into the living room. Inside, Lieutenant Columbo sat on the red velvet couch with Dr. Tim Schaeffer, leaned toward the answering machine on the side table. A wooden donkey mask hung to one side of the doorway, and a knotted mat of primarily red strips of cloth woven and knotted together adorned one wall. On the donkey side there was a white bookshelf and plants in pots striped with earthy colors. Stubble grayed the lower half of Columbo’s face and his eyes watered from hay fever. He was a short middle aged man with curly dark brown hair grown out into a poof just beginning to gray, brown eyes – one of them glass, and a creased face. Dr. Schaeffer beside him had short black hair, gray at the temples and down his sideburns, looking to be somewhere in his forties, with brown eyes. He wore a silvery dressing gown over lavender pajamas with a white rim to the collar. They were just re-listening to the recording Milton had left on the answering machine.

“Tim, can you get here by nine thirty? I can't wait but twenty minutes.” Milton’s voice had an edge of stress to it. “T-T-Tim, I'm in trouble,” he stammered. “I’m in real trou-” Something seemed to interrupt him. “Hey! Hey, don't...don't, please, or I'll…” This part didn’t sound much more stressed than he did before the interruption, but the message ended in a gunshot.

Schaeffer held a cigarette between his fingers and sat forward with his elbow on his knee, gazing ruefully across the room. “I heard it ringing and I didn’t answer, and now he’s dead.”

Columbo nodded. He held a handkerchief in one hand and his small, black notebook in the other, resting the notebook on one leg, his legs crossed. The allergies made him squint a bit. “It doesn’t sound like you’d have had much time to do anything if you did answer, Dr. Schaeffer.”

“He had no luck,” said Schaeffer. “He always said it; I always laughed. I told him he was lucky he was still alive.”

“What time did you pick up your messages this morning, Sir?” asked Columbo.

“I don't know exactly. About an hour ago,” estimated Schaeffer. Columbo looked at his watch. “It’s seven-thirty.”

“Well, I couldn’t sleep, and um…” began Schaeffer, but trailed off when the door opened behind him. He continued as Lieutenant Kitsuragi and Sergeant McGill walked in from the hall. “I was expecting a call from my wife,” finished Schaeffer, then he turned to face the two men who had just entered.

“Lieutenant,” said McGill. “We called the Lytton house. I spoke to a Miss Ruth Lytton. She said her brother fired Milton Schaeffer yesterday morning at around eleven-thirty.”

“Did you talk to the brother?” asked Columbo.

“Miss Lytton won't wake him up, Sir,” replied McGill. “She says he was taking an inventory last night and was probably up until three or four in the morning.”

Columbo sat up and turned toward the man sitting beside him. “Did you know that your brother had been fired, Dr. Schaeffer?”

“No,” replied Schaeffer. “But it figures; he always is...I shouldn’t say that now.”

Columbo sneezed into his handkerchief.

“We checked out Schaeffer’s place,” said Kitsuragi and he conveyed what they’d found (and didn’t find) there.

“Okay well, let’s go to the Lytton’s,” said Columbo.

���Certainly,” said Kitsuragi. He started to walk out the door, but noticed Columbo hadn’t moved from the couch. He stood near the doorway as the sergeant left. “Are we leaving?” he asked.

“Just a mome-” Columbo sneezed again. “Moment.”

“Alright,” accepted Kitsuragi. He took out his notebook to take notes as he waited for Columbo to finish his interview with the brother. It might have seemed strange to loom in the background, but it would inevitably create delays if he went to sit down and join into the conversation when they were just about to leave.

“Should you be up?” asked Schaeffer.

“It’s not a cold,” replied Columbo. “It’s an allergy. Every spring. From what you told me about your brother, Sir, it seems surprising that he would be hired for this sort of work.”

“Yes, it surprised me too,” agreed Schaeffer. “But people like the Lyttons are often surprising. ‘Eccentric’ I think is the term, above a certain income.”

Columbo nodded. “Do you know the Lyttons, Sir?”

“By reputation. Who doesn’t?” Schaeffer smiled.

“Me, Sir, for instance,” replied Columbo.

“My wife is just constantly reading the society columns. There’s a mention of Phyllis Lytton Brant every week,” said Schaeffer.

“Yes, Sir, I know what you mean. My wife is the same way about,” Columbo sneezed again, “Ask Ann, the advice column.” He followed this with another sneeze, holding his folded handkerchief in front of his mouth and nose. “Well, I better be going.” He got up and headed over to where Lieutenant Kitsuragi waited by the door.

Schaeffer got up as well. “Would you like an antihistamine to dry you up there?”

Columbo looked back at him and smiled, holding a hand up in polite refusal as he walked backward toward the door. “No Sir, thank you, just makes me sleepy and at seven-thirty in the morning that’s very dangerous.” He left with Kitsuragi, each going to their own separate motor carriage. Columbo’s was the gray Cabriolet.

The Kineema outpaced the Cabriolet considerably, so when he’d gotten to the Lytton house Kitsuragi waited on the sidewalk for Columbo to arrive. The Lyttons had their house on Le Jardin, a rich neighborhood on a mountainside. From where he stood, Kitsuragi could see the 8/81 below, crossing above Eminent Domain and the River Esperance dividing Revachol East from Revachol West. Couron, where he’d just driven from, lay in Revachol West, on the other side of the river. He could just make out a small herd of giraffes traipsing through one of the run down neighborhoods down there.

The Lytton house sprawled over an expansive lawn. Here and there, trees broke up the monotony of the neatly mowed grass. The red brick had faded to a dull brown. Rounded topiary huddled all around at the house’s feet. Two white stone lions guarded the front steps preceding a path leading to an arched doorway. Multiple chimneys poked up from the brown, sharply sloped roof while dark brown shutters closed in small, narrow windows. The Cabriolet puttered to a stop and sighed. Columbo stepped out, still armed with his handkerchief.

“Lieutenant,” greeted Kitsuragi.

Columbo nodded. “Hello, Lieutenant.”

A middle aged maid with frayed nerves, blonde hair, and a gray dress with a white apron trimmed in lace answered the door. She’d painted her fingernails white and kept her hair medium length. Cathy let the detectives in and showed them to a living room to wait. The room had high vaulted ceilings of darkly stained wood and arched doorways trimmed in wedding mint green. The walls were white, the floors a shiny red hardwood with a plush and ornately patterned rug. The couch and chairs all had cream color upholstery embroidered with dusky floral designs. Sconces along the walls held two candles each, and dark wooden oval tables of varying sizes had been arranged around the seating area. One held a silver tea tray with a white porcelain tea set, the cups red on the inside, gold rimmed, and painted with a pink rose on the side.

A fireplace took up one wall: a large wooden mantle over a stone hearth, with an iron gate screening off the coals. One of the gleaming wooden tables held a stack of coasters, a metal mantle clock, and two porcelain statuettes of elegant ladies in green and white dresses and bonnets. Columbo blew his nose as he looked down at the little porcelain ladies. Kitsuragi stepped forward to greet a woman walking into the room. She looked like she was in her thirties at most, with light gray eyes, thin lips, a cleft chin, and medium length ash blonde hair styled around her head.

Ruth Lytton wore a mauve dressing gown. She looked expectantly at the police officers in her living room. “Yes.”

“Good morning, Miss…?” Kitsuragi greeted.

“Ruth Lytton.”

“Good morning Miss Lytton. I’m Lieutenant Kitsuragi with the Revachol Citizens Militia, and this is my colleague Lieutenant Columbo.”

“Lieutenant Columbo, I’m homicide department,” introduced Columbo with a wet sniff. “Forgive me for waking you up.” He waved, almost a salute, and smiled as he said, “Very nice!” He turned toward the statuettes. “Very nice little things you have standing around. Very nice.”

Lytton smiled and walked around past the side table set with a tea tray. “Well thank you, Lieutenant. Are you interested in figurines, or has there been a homicide?”

“We can’t be sure of that yet,” replied Kitsuragi. “That is, the homicide. My colleague can answer for himself whether he’s interested in figurines, though I’m sure there’s time to chit chat about knick knacks when we aren’t pursuing an investigation.”

“Oh, I’m sorry Madam. Yes and no,” said Columbo. “What I mean is, that’s what I’m trying to find out. You know, when I say ‘homicide department,’ most women, they act a little upset. So I try and calm them with a little chit-chat. I've been doing that for so long that I forgot to notice that you weren’t upset. Forgive me for wandering off.” He scratched at his forehead and looked down.

Lytton stood with her hands folded in front of her. She smiled and tilted her head, nodding as she said, “I’ve disappointed you. My sister won’t. You needn’t even say ‘homicide;’ ‘foul play’ will do it. She faints.”

“Oh I hope not, Madam, that’s the last thing I want,” Columbo said.

“What do you want, Lieutenant?” she asked. “Perhaps if you told me.”

“Oh I’ve wondered off again, haven’t I?” asked Columbo.

“I’m afraid I led you,” replied Lytton. “Won’t you sit down?”

“Thank you.” Columbo wiped his nose on his handkerchief and sat in one of the armchairs.

Kitsuragi sat in a nearby armchair, and Lytton sat across from them on the couch with round, light green throw pillows.

“It has to do with the new guard at the Lytton Museum, Mr. Schaeffer,” said Kitsuragi.

“I gathered that,” said Lytton. “A Sergeant McGill called to inquire about him at seven this morning.”

“Yes Madam, I’m sorry to have gotten you up so early,” apologized Columbo, “on a Sunday morning, but you see we got a call earlier -” he paused as a sneeze welled up in his sinuses. “Early -” he managed to say, then sneezed loudly into his handkerchief. “I’m sorry, Madam, forgive me.”

“No no, not at all.” Lytton looked aside as if in thought.

“Allergy,” Columbo said by way of an explanation.

Lytton rang a silver bell on the coffee table in front of her. “Pollen, I should say. Chamomile tea is the best cure for that. I detest modern medicine, don’t you?”

“Oh sure,” lied Kitsuragi.

Cathy approached quickly in response to the bell. “Yes, Madam?”

Lytton looked back over the backrest of the couch and called over to her, “Cathy, would you bring the lieutenant a cup of chamomile tea?”

“Yes’m.” Cathy turned around and left to do just that.

Lytton turned back to the detectives. “You got a report?”

“Yes, that Mr. Schaeffer had disappeared,” replied Kitsuragi. “He called his brother last night at nine o’ clock, and he left a message asking for help.”

“Then we heard a noise,” Columbo put in. He hesitated then said, “Which we’re pretty sure was a gunshot.”

“Good heavens,” said Lytton.

“Yes,” nodded Columbo.

“We don’t know where the call originated from, so we’re trying to track him down,” said Kitsuragi.

“Well that’s strange,” said Lytton slowly. “And awkward, too. It leaves the museum unprotected. I shall have to ask my brother to hire some one immediately.”

Columbo held the side of his knuckles up to his mouth as he thought. “He’s the one who fired Mr. Schaeffer. Is he also the one who hired him?”

“Yes,” nodded Lytton. She looked into the middle distance as she remembered something then held up a finger. “No, no, wait a minute. I believe it was my niece who hired him.”

Columbo leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “It's kind of a delicate question, Madam, but, I mean, considering the way you live and all, and considering what I found out about Mr. Schaeffer this morning…”

Lytton looked at him. “What did you find out, Lieutenant?”

Kitsuragi hadn’t been there for Columbo’s conversation with Dr. Schaeffer about Mr. Schaeffer.

A woman in her twenties approached wearing a white sailor shirt with a black necktie and black pants. She had shoulder-length dark brown hair with fringe, a slender figure, and a long face with pronounced cheek bones and nose. Janie Brandt called over, “Aunt Ruth? Aren’t you coming to breakfast?”

Lytton introduced her niece to the detectives and vise versa. Columbo and Kitsuragi rose from the couch.

“Well hello, Madam,” greeted Columbo.

“How do you do, Miss Janie,” greeted Kitsuragi. “Your aunt was just telling us that you hired Mr. Schaeffer. What led you to pick him to be the security guard for your family’s museum?”

Brandt looked steadily and silently at Kitsuragi.

“Miss?” said Kitsuragi. He asked, “Did you hire Mr. Schaeffer?”

Brandt nodded.

“How did you happen to choose him?” asked Columbo.

Brandt turned to Lytton. “Aunt Ruth?”

“It’s alright dear, you can tell them,” Lytton said. “Mr. Schaeffer is missing and the RCM is trying to find him.”

Brandt spoke uncertainly. “Well, I uh just put an ad in the paper and he, uh…”

Janie’s mother Phyllis Lytton-Brandt walked in from the next room. She was an aging woman with elegantly coiffed short blonde hair, red lipstick, and a long white dress trimmed with black ribbons. The two ribbons forming stripes down the front of the bosom of her dress hung down loosely just past the curve of her chest to form long tails trailing past her waist. Her white dress with black ribbon coordinated well with her daughter’s white shirt with a black stripe on the sailor collar. She looked around with some confusion and approached rapidly while Janie stammered quietly.

“Good morning,” said Phyllis with a smile.

“Good morning, Phyllis dear,” greeted Ruth Lytton from where she still sat on the couch. “This is Lieutenant Columbo and Lieutenant Kitsuragi of homicide.”

“Oh! Hah…” Phyllis’s eyes rolled up and she neatly dropped to the floor.

Ruth looked down at her sister then back up at the detectives with a smile. “You see?”

Later that day as Kitsuragi got to his Kineema he heard the radio crackling within. He hurriedly sat down to pick it up. Dispatch had a call to investigate a double homicide at the Lytton Museum over in Stella Maris. Kitsuragi put on his siren and pulled swiftly out onto the road, rushing to the scene. He arrived at the curving curb in front of the edifice sometime after the arrival of the forensics lorry and a couple patrol cars.

“What happened?” Kitsuragi asked of Sergeant McGill as he emerged from his motor carriage.

They walked past the shaped topiary up the red stone steps to the entrance of the large brown stone building. It had a red clay tile roof, a tower, an ornate dark brown balcony, and a castle-like parapet atop a wall adjacent to the entrance. White stone lions, just like at the Lytton house, perched to either side of the stairs. Behind them, before they got inside and just as McGill began to speak, there was a screech of tires and a thump. Kitsuragi turned around to see Columbo had braked his motor carriage too late in parking to avoid bumping into the patrol car in front of him. Kitsuragi nearly flinched. Columbo turned off the engine and stepped out onto the street. An officer in uniform looked down at the collision. Columbo waved to him in passing and said, “Sorry about the MC,” as he continued on toward the museum.

“It’s alright, Sir, you got the dent,” the officer called after him.

“Mhm,” murmured Kitsuragi.

Several motor carriages had parked along the curb by this point. Bystanders craned their necks to see what might be going on and a few patrol officers milled around.

“Well.” McGill cleared his throat. “As I was about to say, Miss Janie Brandt found the bodies of Mr. Milton Schaeffer and her uncle Edward Lytton in one of the rooms of the Lytton Museum.”

Columbo joined them as they walked rapidly into the museum. Two officers guarded a doorway. The interior had wine-red walls and beige marble floors with red accents. All the wood of the ceiling, doors, and moulding was a deep brown. Just past the door guarded by the two police officers, a large marble bust stood on a wooden pillar in its own little alcove. The sconces of candles looked just like the ones at the Lytton house. This entry hall and the adjoining hall were both well lit, but as they walked through another doorway into a room with glass-covered displays and suits of armor along the walls, nobody had turned the lights on and it was nearly pitch black in there.

Kitsuragi took out his flashlight and aimed it at the floor ahead of them. “Why hasn’t anybody turned on the lights?”

“Sergeant?” asked Columbo.

“Because Lieutenant Columbo said to leave everything just as it was, and the hallway is adjacent to the murder room,” explained Sergeant McGill, “And one of the bodies fell almost in the doorway.”

A man in a blue suit, blue necktie, and white shirt approached holding a flashlight. He was a stocky man with a pink face and graying brown hair. He called out, “Sergeant McGill! Sergeant – oh, hi Lieutenant Kitsuragi, hi Lieutenant Columbo. Say, Philips has to use a flashlight to outline the bodies. We've dusted the light switch here and in the hall. Now, can't we turn the lights on?”

“Not until the Lieutenant says so,” replied Sergeant McGill.

“Please do turn on the lights,” replied Kitsuragi.

They continued on into what McGill had called the murder room. Forensics teams armed with flashlights combed over the evidence in a large room filled with glass cases lined in red velvet featuring antique weapons and jewelry.

“Yes Sir,” said McGill, and he leaned over to flick two light switches up.

One body lay on its back halfway out of a phone booth in the corner, wearing rubber covers on his shoes, red socks, and a dark blue suit. Men in gray suits stood over the body while a heavyset patrol officer in uniform stood watching from a few meters away with his arms crossed over his chest. Somebody had left a forensics kit on an ornately carved wooden chair with faded red patterned cushions.

“This is just the way we found it, Sir,” said McGill.

“Very good, Sergeant,” said Kitsuragi. He pulled out his blue notebook and pen.

“The contents of his pockets are on the case here, Lieutenant.” McGill gestured to one of the glass cases. A gurney with a blue sheet waited by one wall. “He obviously entered here after cutting the alarm and breaking into the basement. He then broke into the cases.”

“Excuse me Sergeant,” said Columbo, holding the stub of a green cigar between his fingers. He didn’t seem to be suffering from allergies today. He leaned over to a fellow examining the pocket contents on the glass case. “You done?” he asked.

“Almost,” the man replied.

McGill leaned in close as if to pull back Columbo’s attention. “...Removed the objects and placed them in the briefcase. And then he went down to his motor carriage, saw the tire was flat, and panicked! Came back up here and tried to call his brother.” He held up two fingers of each hand as if holding two pistols. “Lytton surprised him while he was on the phone. He fired and Lytton fired at the same time.”

Columbo nodded. “Right.”

Kitsuragi jotted notes down in his blue notebook. “Well, we know where Schaeffer is.”

Chapter Two

[lamaisongaga]

THE BORN THIS WAY BALL TOUR FASHION: ACT II

As promised, here is the second part of our Born This Way Ball fashion series! Make sure to read the first part as well.

The white patent cage “Bad Romance” dress as well as the jackets worn by the dancers (in my opinion one of the top 3 most notorious TBTWBT costumes) are fruits of cooperation of the London fashion house Void of Course and Gaga’s stylist Brandon Maxwell. 

The white leather mask with ram horns and sharp cheekbones was created by Cecilio Castrillo.

During her show in Melbourne on June 27, Gaga debuted a brand new costume.

The bespoke electric blue cape jacket with sculpted short sleeves and matching mini skirt ensemble were custom made for her, and belong to the Void of Course for TBTWBT collection!

The matching blue perspex crown with metallic golden prongs was custom-made by Tentacle Studio.

Gaga kicked off the Latin American leg of tour in Mexico City, where she performed at the sports and concerts venue Foro Sol in front of more than 40,000 people, where Gaga debuted a new costume for her “Judas” performance.

The embroidered silk bustier dress with exaggerated sculpted hips was custom-made by Christian Lacroix, based on a Haus of Gaga design and a selection of archive pieces hand-picked by Sacha Walckhoff, the creative director of the French fashion house.

Now, “Fashion of his Love”. The first look was this custom Versace body-hugging one-shoulder wet-look gown with side peek-a-boo detail and ultra high side slit. 

In other photos, we can see her wearing matching thigh-high platform boots made by Armani Privé for her.

Next, a bespoke Perry Meek sleeveless red tuxedo dress with notched lapel, architectural exaggerated shoulders and tapered cape-like back. 

One of my favorites, but unfortunately only worn for one show.

Gaga said it’s been her life’s dream to be dressed in Italian designers and she has collaborated on her TBTWBT costumes with some of today’s biggest Italian designers. 

Heart Attack look, the purple flounced taffeta cape with bow detail and giant heart shaped helmet is based on the Moschino Fall/Winter 2012 collection.

The winged solid black statement sunnies with dark grey lenses are the Rana from ksubi’s Spring/Summer 2012 collection.

The most popular “Fashion of his Love” costume comprises a custom Christian Dada pink origami crane dress featuring deep V-neck and column skirt, matching straw hat, sunglasses and custom Moschino cape made entirely of pink marabou powder puffs.

When I asked Christian about this satin pink dress with foldable skirt, he said: “The origami crane has long been a symbol of healing in the Japanese culture, a symbol Japanese people always put feelings and prayers into. I’ve made it with ‘the reality of Japan’ and ‘hope for the future’ in mind”.

There are about 120 hours of work behind this bespoke wearable piece of art.

[cmrosens]

New Release! The Snow Child by C.M. Rosens

My latest release is now available! #fairytale #folkhorror #darkfiction #shortstory #readmorebooks #readingtime #booksbooksbooks

The freak June blizzard shrouded the scarecrow in white mist, but Jem Gregson wasn’t trudging out of the farmhouse with his rifle on Old Rusty’s account. He was out here for the snowmen. They were in a row, slender columns of tightly packed, brilliant crystals, glittering until his eyes ached. Each had a perfectly round ball placed on top of its tapered trunk. They had just appeared through the…

[notmuchtoconceal]

The Mandrake, Pt. 1 of None

The girl’s skin is green with the softness of battered flesh.

If she were brown, her innards would be tart and firm, but she’s mostly tasteless mush. What remains of her face is a wrinkled depression implying the outline of eyes and nose. A slanting molar column mars the slope where her body tapers from stem to base.

A faint gurgle bubbles from her insides. The skin beside the teeth flaps in and out, spewing what sounds like “kill me.”

Bulges of necrotic tissue, still shaped like breasts, shoulder blades and fingers, slicken against the latex suit of her dermis. The name she had as a human is classified. Lost among an avalanche of file folders in a mountainous region of dusty filing cabinets.

She sits in a field outside a plastic pseudo-suburb and smog’s gushing from the mortar lungs of cutout factories mid in the near-distance. With midday resurging, the black veil recedes and decaying radiation shines in a vast tanning bed of yellow dawn. Crows gather on the tops of power lines and radio towers, hunger gleaming in pebbles black and shining with acid rain. Within minutes, the flock could descend as a hurricane of feather and sinew and pick apart the girl to a slimy pit of black bone.

The birds are set dressing placed here to inform me that this is a wet operation. Or, due to the impairment of the target, a thankless execution.

Sickle Cell’s dressed all in white, looking a bit like a barn owl resting on top of a ceramic mall mannequin. Under a wide umbrella, in a beach chair, she’s lounging in a matching sundress and hat with oversized circular sunglasses, the rims of which gleam impeccably. She crosses her legs, squeaking leather boots that she can’t possibly afford, and enters into a staring contest with the girl’s eyeless visage. It is one not one which is unfamiliar to the eye which trains itself on remaining untrained. The subtle curvature of her apricot lips and the tautness of her cheeks display mutual sadness and repulsion. She gives this look to herself in the mirror after coming home from dinner. Behind those opacified lenses, her eyes are running down the curvature of the girl and she’s laying that impression like tracing paper over the memory of her own body.

“Do you pity it?” Sickle asks.

Sweat’s soaking through my new shirt. My jeans are shit, but my back’s held up rigidly straight to draw attention to my upper body.

Certain details are not clear to me. As the hot sun beats down on my head and the long walk simmers in my legs, it’s best to put-off dwelling on them until the last possible second.

“Can’t feel much of anything, sorry. Slept through breakfast and skipped lunch.”

“I know; I’m a bit peckish, too. I still can’t help but feel something for her. It, I mean.”

Kneeling down next to her, my fingers run through her expertly mussed hair.

“Are you planning to meet somebody later?”

Her shoulders retract as she looks at the horizon. She slips off her sunglasses and sunlight strikes her eyes in a golden censor bar as she lingers with a dignified melancholy—a look that you can’t help but dismiss as a display of holier-than-thou mock-sentiment.

With a deep breath and the smells of ash, burning fat and dry dirt fill my lungs. Plastic glove on my hand, my legs swagger toward the girl.

“What’re you doing?” Sickle asks.

“We were tasked with this case for a reason, love.”

The scarecrow standing ten feet away is a hanged-man with a noose made of straw intestine. A burning hot pole enters his rectum and pierces the cap of his skull. This tells me the girl committed a crime worthy of two deaths. The fingers of his right hand cover his lips while the fingers of his left hand cross behind his back. This outs the girl as an informant or snitch. The cosmetics caked on his face tell me the girl had an active nightlife, possibly moonlighting as a hair metal singer or party clown.

I linger on the scarecrow’s bright yellow sundress and the string of doll-heads hanging from fishhooks in the straw rope.

Kneeling beside the girl, dry grass scratches my knees through frayed denim knotholes. My fingers run delicately over her exposed teeth, which have the soft smoothness of porcelain. The textures of her flesh alternate between the weave of canvas and the chunky ripples of papier-mâché. Living animal warmth radiates from her skin. Her body muffles the audible machinery of digestion and blood circulation.

She reeks of lilac perfume and red wine. The latter could be either a leftover from her last night as a human, or the onset of fermentation. On her back is an unspoiled patch of milky white skin emblazoned with a tramp-stamp depicting two worms wrapped around an oar.

I snap my fingers and weakly mumble “totally called it” and it’s only a few seconds later, after a few crows caw like they’re congratulating me, that I wish I’d made more of a show of things.

“Did you check for STDs?” Sickle asks.

“Hell no. I’m not reaching into those fetid depths unless my life depends on it. I bet she has more crabs than a Red Lobster.”

She moans softly to herself. “I could go for some crabs right now.”

“This bitch has the mark, dearest. She was definitely one of CHERRIE’s. From the detail in the tattoo, I’m going to say she was classy enough to be more than a fuck-toy, but from the location, too slutty to be in his harem of silk-clad vampire wives.”

“You think he ever wined and dined it? Candles, violins, clam chowder. Everything.”

“He’s totally the kind of asshole who deludes himself into thinking he’s sophisticated. We’re going to interrogate the vegetable to our heart’s content before commencing with the execution.”

“Are you positive that it’s no longer a person? I mean, it still has teeth!”

“Flytraps have teeth.”

“Not human teeth, dear.”

“What differences does it really make?” I shrug my shoulders and only realize now how heavy my upper body really feels. “We’ve got calcified husks specialized for tearing and grinding. They’ve got thin sensory prongs. It’s the difference between a meat-grinder and a steak knife.”

“Is feeling up an empty bra as fun as groping a full breast?”

“That depends on how lacy it is, now stop changing the subject. This woman, dear Sickle, is going to die because she deserves to die. That decision was made by people smarter than you, who are more willing to assess reality by hoisting their responsibilities on me, a capable agent.”

“What reality is that?” She slides her sunglasses back on. “That all life is equally worthless, but the law carries weight to a degree that it’s pointless to question it, though you'll question everything else?”

“Sickle, you need to lose that tone. It’s simple pragmatism, come now. If we wanted to determine if she was more human or vegetable, we’d need to perform a dissection, so she’s fucked either way. We could kill her, leave her here, rip out her guts and throw them at geese. It’s all going to accomplish the same amount of nothing, so it’s sensible to drain the last remnants of her miserable life pursuing information.”

That shuts Sickle up for a bit.

The crows caw like they’re laughing at her. Now that she’s drained her capacity for rational argument, she attempts to implore my emotions in a passive-aggressive manner without seeming at all obvious about it.

“It’s different, you know. Wishing harm on something and witnessing it. I knew it a bit. We weren’t friends or anything. In fact I frequently found it irritable on good days and obnoxious on bad days, but I’d never wish this on anything, not even my worst enemy or my best friend.”

I’m not paying much attention to her.

My body stinks of sweat and rotting fruit salad. My hands finger the cap of a bottle of cologne in my pocket and I’m pretending to stretch and yawn so I can discreetly spritz myself.

“Dearest, you wouldn’t have the imagination to wish this on her.”

She’s rummaging through a white leather purse. “I used to think it was a convenience to hang out with someone who felt so little. It was nice to not be expected to fake tears when I had none to shed.”

“Always a pain, isn’t it, love?” I ask. “Doesn’t it diminish the worth of empathy to falsify it so regularly? They blow soldiers to bits in deserts, cork children with assault weapons, and I’m expected to fake tears for a fruitcup like a thunderous orgasm in the great porno theater of life.”

Sickle opens an eggshell compact from her purse. She can’t see her own eyes. “Cruelty is understandable when it’s either anonymous or personal. I weep for the dead children. Really, I do. I’m only human after all. They’re so young, so unsure of everything. The girls I watch after look at me with such warm smiles that it crushes my heart whenever they so much as frown. I suppose there’s a sort of lull in the spectrum of human empathy. I simply cannot be bothered to care for someone I barely know. Nothing needs to be said about the raw nerve of a loved one in pain, but with strangers, there’s a sort of purity in aimless victimization.”

Crouching over Sickle’s lap, the prongs of the umbrella poke my scalp. My hands fall upon her shoulders and my face slides inches from her nose. She has to smell the cologne. In the reflection of her sunglasses is the first haircut I’ve had in months.

I lick my lips and whisper in her ear. “What I’m taking from that stirring oratory is that I’ve got carte blanche to torture the veggie.”

Her lacquered gaze glides along the barren earth. She pushes me off, takes two steps toward the girl and stops as if lost in thought.

I smell my forearm and spritz myself some more.

The crows look like they’re nudging and shushing each other. When I walk up beside her, she’s giggling.

“Maybe instead of an interrogation,” she says, “we can perform a firsthand investigation of certain, uh… dineries in the area to see if we can find any… um, physical evidence of occupation by hostile forces. You said yourself that this mystery man might take his prospects out for dinner.”

“Why do I bring you out on field work? You’re a useless combination of hungry, lazy and female.”

She whines so suddenly her glasses fall off.

“I want crab legs.”

“Crab legs do sound nice.”

“Fried shrimp.”

“Oh fuck, fried shrimp…”

“Lobster.”

My stomach rumbles. “Maybe we can just nibble on the vegetable?”

“You’re not even sure if it’s still human. That could be cannibalism.”

“Jesus Christ, can you go five seconds without pointing out another ethical ambiguity?”

“Why? I was planning to make a game of it.”

“I bet she would taste good with applesauce.”

I had anticipated she would moan the word “applesauce” in the throes of muted orgasm, but her mind is elsewhere else and she’s probing the girl with squinting eyes and not a hint of appetite.

“Can it hear us?” she asks.

“Does she have ears?”

“I don’t think so? What’s that thing on its side?”

“The beginnings of an asexual budding?”

“Throw a rock at it.”

I hoist a chunk of broken granite from the base of a pile of stones. The edges scratch my naked palms. I whirl and toss it through the air and watch it rip through the soft flesh of her growth. A glistening bright red wound, like overripe watermelon in the harsh sunlight gushes a rivulet of blood and fluorescent mucus with the viscosity of corn syrup.

The girl lets out a horrible shriek that rips through my ears and forces the perched crows to take off and block out the sun.

I can’t even hear my own obscenity over the ringing in my ears.

‘I’m going to fucking kick that thing, I swear!” yells Sickle.

“She’ll scream again, you bimbo! Don’t fucking touch her!”

Sickle reaches up to her ears and watches blood run down her palm.

“I won’t,” she says, “but only because I’m thinking of the glop it’ll get on my new boots”

“Can you repeat that darling, I fear I’m a wee bit deaf in one ear.”

“Huh? What did you just say? Try talking into the ear that isn’t bleeding.”

“She’s developed the perfect defense mechanism to endure any interrogation. How could she have started evolving so soon after transmogrification?”

“Nope, still can’t hear you,” shouts Sickle.

“No method of polite coercion will get her to talk if she can scream that fucking loud.”

“I’m still trying to figure out how you expect it to talk when it doesn’t have a mouth.”

“Our only hope is to forsake the threat of pain and force upon her the fear of an instant death.”

“I like that you’re not answering my questions.”

“She’ll talk if we drag her up someplace high and suspend her on the edge of vertigo. There’s no way she’ll be stupid enough to scream and risk us letting her go, as that will set into motion her rapid descent to a delectable splat on the pavement.”

“It really is the only way,” she’s twirling her sunglasses on her finger. “There’s no way it would talk if I sat down and tried to ask it questions. We are, of course, one-hundred percent positive that it wants to withhold information. Poor dear would never think to buy protection.”

I reach under my shirt and spritz my chest. “You really need to learn how to mix business with pleasure, you know that?”

The girl mumbles something again. It sounds like “For fuck’s sake, will you shut up and kill me already!”

Sickle walks up to the girl. “Hey sweetie, how are you feeling?”

The girl screams something unflattering about Sickle’s figure.

“Oh fuck you, fat ass!” she says. “You’re one to talk. That’s not an apple bottom, it’s a bean-bag bottom, bitch!”

“Sickle, stop while you’re ahead,” I implore lucidly, so sick of saying. “The interrogation is a delicate art and frankly I’m Bosch at a triptych and you’re a kindergartener with finger-paints.” I walk up to the girl and calmly ask, “Well, fat ass, what’s your relationship with CHERRIE?”

She says, “Eat a dick, faggot.”

“Mmm-hmmm,” I rub my chin. “Sickle, darling, cover your ears.”

Yanking the penknife I always carry in my pocket, I stab her with dozens of vigorous jerks until she screams so loudly, my blind furor slows to a wobbly stutter. White circles flash against my collapsed eyelids and I fall back into the sun-drenched dirt. Red sticky heat fills my ears and runs down my cheeks. When I open my eyes, Sickle’s face is hovering over me, out of focus, her mouth flapping with hysteric jaw contortions, but no words are coming out. When I push her aside and try to stand up, my head throbs with a pulsating buzz and a static whine fills the silent vacuum of the world. My arm is numb and my elbow is on fire with a peroxide burn. The girl’s twitching like she’s in the onset of an epileptic fit. An assortment of fluids, all some shade of green, red or brown, pours down her corkboard flesh as it succumbs to black splotches of rot.

I sit down on the dirt completely of my own volition. I don’t stumble backwards and land on my ass. Sickle pulls a cluster of movie theater napkins from her purse and clutches two wads to my ears. The cheap pulp scratches at the swollen cartilage and bloats with blood so quickly that after a minute it’s not soaking in anything.

Ten minutes later, after standing hunched over a particularly eroded bit of soil sutured by railroad spikes, blood pouring ontp the ground and not my clothes, my hearing comes back.

Sickle’s mumbling to herself about how I either don’ t think things through or over-think everything for so long that I end up not doing anything and that I should really pick one or the other already.

I turn to her and say “I can hear you clearly now.”

She smiles and says, “Well, thanks for that brilliant display of your interrogation skills.”

“Do you have any bright ideas, love? I’m ready to chuck this bitch off a building regardless of how much she talks.”

She puts her sunglasses back on. “I propose we retire the old phrase ‘draining blood from a stone’ and from now on use the far more topical ‘stabbing information out of a vegetable’.”

‘You were a fool for ever questioning my blood-lust, dearest” I turn to the girl, and with the solemn voice of an executioner ask “What say you, veggie? If you speak now, we will grant you entrance to immortality on your own terms. If not, we, who are now death incarnate, will make you suffer to your last breath.”

The girl does not answer.

She continues to twitch and bleed and I can’t tell if she’s purposefully biting her tongue or vocally impaired due to the severing of a vital nerve.

Frankly, I don’t care much and mournfully intone, “Then suffering you shall have.”

Sickle pauses. “You should light it on fire,” she says. “It might explode.”

“I’d rather crush it under something heavy,” I say. “There’s something immensely satisfying about the splatter of cracking bones.”

“These are all pie-in-the-sky ideas, dear. You don’t have anything that can burn or crush. You’ll need to be more down to earth and I don’t think you can do that on an empty stomach.”

There’s a gnawing rumble in my guts. I say, “Let’s leave her on the train tracks and call it a day.”

“Who knows how long we’ll be waiting for a train to pass by? It could take hours. I don’t want to sit here all day. I’m hungry now.”

“You’re right. Who wants to be a passive observer when it comes to murder? I want blood on my hands, goddamn it.”

“Did you ever think about witnesses,” Sickle says, “who’s to say whether or not this is murder?”

“Darling, you can’t expect the common man to decide for themselves what deaths are justified. Their sense of right and wrong are as shapeless as puddings left out overnight. There’s no objective measurement for the value of a human life. When a soldier is shot, we mourn. When a gangbanger is shot, we sing praises and thank Christ that thug is off the streets. Really, though, they’re both thugs; but time and money goes into a soldier, while a gangbanger becomes what he is because he comes from a home with neither, but some people even the government don't fuckin wanna buy, praise the fuckin secondhand market!”

She flutters her eyelashes. “It’s like when I was five and you let Gabrielle eat the neighbor woman’s cockatoo and the old lady spanked you with a cane. Then you cried because nobody cared that I let her tear a bunch of ‘filthy, disease-ridden’ pigeons to bits of pillow stuffing?”

I stop talking for a while. She’s smiling. How can she be smiling? I stare at Sickle’s face and see only obsidian self-portraits. My own eyes stare back at me; eyes that see my own slumped shoulders and wonder how someone who loves me can be so cruel and why, as time keeps moving and I don’t say anything, the smile settles into practiced apathy. Her cheeks slacken into silk bed sheets unruffled by sleeping bodies and my teeth are pressing together so hard that my jaw aches, and she’s about to speak, but I open my mouth and talk like nothing happened.

“It’s polite to say that human beings are irreplaceable,” there’s a tension on my vocal cords, “but they’re an infinitely renewable resource. The only value inherent in a human life lies in the whole of their collective experiences. Why do you think we take pity when celebrities or geniuses are on death row? The problem is we extend that sympathy to those who don’t deserve it. It’s all right to kill a senile old man because his brain has atrophied into a viscous mixture of dust and mucus liable to confused with aforementioned overnight pudding, left out on the same counter as the catfood, not at all east to conflate at two in the Am. It’s all right to kill a child in the womb because they have worthless brains made of undifferentiated jelly, and hardly have much flavor without the fear of death. There is always a correct amount of drama to indulge, my dear”

Sickle stands in silence. What I can see of her face shows the collision of guilt with composure. I raise my hands and invite her to stumble into my arms where I’ll coo her and tell her that she’s not guilty; that she’s not a predatory hawk, but a sweet canary whose love warms the frozen cockles of my heart like some kind of nasty microwaveable meal.

She doesn’t move.

She says, “I’ve seen septic tanks less full of shit than you.”

I move forward. “But none have smelled so nice, have they? Did you notice my new cologne? I got it yesterday. Here, come smell me. I used like half the bottle.”

“The only things I’ve done today are smell you and listen to you, and frankly, I’m a bit tired of both. Let’s get this thing out of here. If you’re gonna kill it, stop talking about it and do it already, because it won’t be daytime forever.”

“Do you think she’s going to be heavy?”

“I never imagined you carrying it, dear. I assumed you’d have no qualms about kicking it on its side and rolling it.”

“Hey, I’m sorry.”

“I know. You’re always sorry.”

“You’re not the only one who can dress up like a high-class whore, you know,” I spritz myself until the skin on my neck is irritated. “This shit cost me like five dollars.”

The girl screams when I push her onto the hot pavement.

She rolls a few feet before she seems to jump and wobble back onto her base. A leathery punching bag is sweating olive oil. With my still gloved hand attached to my still numb arm, I inspect her stab wounds to find the landmine field of punctures exploding into lumpy clusters of fluid-filled sacks. I continue to push and roll the girl. When the weight of her body pushes down on the growths, they act like a spring.

It takes careful diligence to hear the watery boing sound, as each one’s eclipsed by a perfectly timed scream. By the end of the block, she’s either exhausted or too overwhelmed with pain to let out anything more than a tired yelp and frankly, I’m tired of pushing her.

I collapse on the curb and languish in the oppressive sun. The concrete grain’s cutting into the thin layer of flesh around my pelvic bone.

“All right, Sickle,” I say, “I’ve done my part, now you kick her the rest of the way.”

“You’re kidding, right?” she asks, panting as if walking beside me was already too much work for her. She fans herself diligently. Looking around, as if it must be here. “You don’t even know where you’re going!”

“Then it’s hopeless. I guess I’m going to sit here all day and stare at your massive thunder-thighs.”

She takes the bait and gives me a look that says, “It’s on now, bitch.”

Her eyes run up and down the girl’s body. There’s two dents in her flesh: a footprint on the left bottom and a handprint on the right top. Sickle rips off her sunglasses in a way that I think she thinks is dramatic.

Practiced shit-talk is running through her mind. Inches away, she folds her arms and gives the girl a look that says, “What you gonna do, bitch?” Both hands on the girl now, she’s straining for a powerful shove, but dry-heaves, slips down the slope and rubs the pavement with her cheeks.

I’m too embarrassed to laugh.

She starts to cry. “I got dirt on my new dress!”

“Are you sure you’re up for this?” I ask, “I regained my breath. I can take back over if you like.”

“No,” she wails. “I’m not being bested by a vegetable.”

I watch until my body aches through osmosis.

She pushes, slips, gets back up. Over and over. Can’t hardly move. The glucose engine that’s my brain’s runnin’ on empty. My bones and fibers rotate the useless analogue coil.

A Coke machine’s beyond a factory gate.

My autonomous body shuffles that way. Can’t read the sign, pull quarters from my pocket, probably enough. Click, click, click, beep, buzz, plop. Oh, it’s cold. Blood’s pouring back into my brain. My throat’s massaged internally with a glycerin clam.

I walk back over to Sickle and ask, “Making progress?”

“Of course,” she says, “I’d managed to shove it at least two inches this way.”

“Good work. Now how many inches in a city block? At this incredible momentum, it’ll only take us however many minutes that is.”

Sickle dashes at the girl with her elbow as hard as a battering ram. There’s a wet plop and warm droplets of sticky gunk splash my face.

I back away, but she keeps charging and charging. Sickle stares at a massive brown stain seeping into her dress. It soaks through to the skin, making the material cling to the outline of her tits. Chunks of mushy flesh stick to the dimples in her chest and melt to yogurt between her cleavage.

I wave at her while discreetly rubbing my nipples. She yanks on her neckline, and the dress turns from shrink-wrap to garbage bag.

I ask, “Do you want to find a sprinkler or something?”

She screams and tugs at her hair. Pointing at the girl, she yells “Die, bitch, die!” Sprinting in place with her squat legs, she’s throwing out all the weight her little body has, but the growths swell up into speed bumps.

Now Sickle’s barely standing, hunched over with her hands on her knees and sucking in air harder than a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner. Throttling my hands around her waist, I lift her up, give the girl a good kick and we’re halfway down the block before I dry-heave and fall over.

We lie in the grass, our lungs contracting and Sickle lets out a cry with the staccato vibration of a cough.

“Why are we so out of shape!” she cries. “You said you were going to start lifting weights!”

“I did start,” I say. “The hard part was continuing.”

The girl’s toppled over in the shade beneath a tree. She’s laughing and rolling from side to side. Laughing really isn’t the most accurate word to describe it, but I think it’s what she’s going for. It’s a sort of guttural bubbling from the intestines buzzing through pussy lips.

A sound that makes your asshole clench.

Sickle sits up. “If I was that ugly, I don’t think I’d find much of anything funny.”

“I’m sure she meant to cry. She’s so stupid, she screwed up a reflex.”

With each laugh, the flap of skin on her mouth balloons out, sucks in and clings to her throat lining.

“Shove it, fish tits!” I kick her teeth and what starts as a scream breaks down into dry hacking.

“Hey, move aside!” Sickle runs up and spin-kicks the girl’s soft flank. “You ruined my outfit, fatty!”

Juice splashes my pant legs and Sickle’s white boots. My foot breaks through the girl’s skin, into some kind of warm pothole and with a loud shlorp I’m sucked in up to the ankle. Burning petroleum jelly seeps between my toes. Pricks crawl up and down my foot. The hole clenches tighter around my ankle as white plumes of steam whisk from the girl’s pores. Sickle runs to my back and gives me the Heimlich as the tendons in my jerking leg tighten into a hemp rope. I plop loose and fall on top of Sickle. The scorched wrinkles of my red foot are tender in the sun.

My shoe is still inside.

I wiggle my toes, peel off the other shoe and shove it in the hole.

Sickle stares at me with wide eyes and flat eyebrows.

“Really?”

“This makes it even,” I say.

An old woman no doubt owns the house we’re squatting in front of. White siding sags and grey shingles on the roof thin into the gutters and walkway, exposing patches of rotted plywood. Angel statues swallowed up by shrubbery, flowerpots shaped like nesting fawns asphyxiated by vines, plywood dogs clawed by twisting branches.

Sickle heaves a stone garden gnome holding a sign saying “Welcome” and drops it on the girl’s teeth. My shoe shoots out of the hole with a wet plop and the other inches out in slow contractions. They’re both coated with yellow mucus and reek of burning rubber.

“Thanks,” I say, and drop the shoes down an open sewer drain.

“Listen,” she says. “I am very, very hungry.”

“Are you still on that? Now that fish tits isn’t screaming, we can probably take another stab at interrogating her.”

She slides her sunglasses back on. With a breathy giggle that comes off more like a bitter sigh she says, “Listen, I’ve got a dinner date. I need to be leaving soon. Do you understand?”

I scratch my neck.

“Well, you look like shit now, so you might as well ditch it.”

“I’m afraid that’s not an option. You’re going to have to find some way of getting me there, or find someone else to help you move this thing.”

My fists clench.

“I should have left your ass at home and forced Key Lime out here instead,” I say. “He’d whine a fraction as much, then do twice the work, and he’s the laziest guy I know.”

“Oh, but I work so hard at being lazy!”

“He can help you push the damn thing and I can stroll behind and whack your ass with a newspaper. Tell him he owes you for staying over in your room the last few days.”

“He hasn’t been staying in my room; I haven’t seen him since last week.”

At this, I sit up. “What do you mean you haven’t seen him? I haven’t seen him.”

“Why would he be with me?”

“He’s your best gal-pal. Why wouldn’t he be with you?”

“I have a life outside of him.”

“Does he have a life outside of you?”

Her pleading eyes tell me she knows I’m right, but she’s going to pretend I’m not.

“I don’t have any idea where he could be,” she says.

She dials his number, I crouch down beside her, and we press our ears together into two funnels of cartilage tuned into the digitized ring of the dial tone. “Hey…” comes a groggy voice.

I say, “Key Lime, where the fuck—”

“I’m not here right now. But if you’d like, you can leave a message and I can get back to you… Except, I probably won’t, so don’t be angry next time I see you and ask why I didn’t call back. I don’t understand phones, okay? Now how do I get out of here? … Push what button? Hurry up, I think it’s still recording…No. No, I think it’s still on … Don’t yell at me. Okay, fine, if you know how to do it just take it!”

She sighs. “My poor boy,” and the beep flares out. “Hello Key Lime, it’s me. We’re near the train tracks down by 69th and K—”

“He doesn’t understand streets.”

“We’re across the street from the Baskin Robbins! We’re trying to move something. Come help us.”

“You couldn’t mention a different landmark?”

She glares at me. “If you come we’ll get you a smoothie, you don’t have to ask. Good-bye.”

“Ask him where he’s been for the last few days.”

“We’ll ask him when he calls back.”

“He’s not going to call back, we’re wasting our time.”

“It was your idea to call him!”

“What, you do everything I say now? Flash the next car that drives by.”

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that with a dry t-shirt.”

I pat her on the head. We somehow roll the girl out to a busy street and this is where we need to make things count if we want anyone to help us haul the fat skank away. I collapse against her rough, leathery hide and the smell of fermentation is so strong my first instinct is to pull away, but I think I’m getting drunk just sniffing her, so I lay still in a stupor.

My shirt’s soaked through with sweat and my eyes fall straight across the street. Sickle steps up to the corner, pointing at the girl, and then waving at passing cars. A guy stops, asks if she’s a hooker and drives off.

Her face puffs up in a cantankerous balloon and I laugh for a good minute before realizing I’m part of the punch line.

I turn to Sickle. “We can run with the hooker thing.”

Fifteen minutes later, Sickle and I stand on the side of the road, my jeans rolled up to my knee and my long, pretty legs nestled between her thighs, sticking out through her dress, her two legs wrapped around my hips and joining into a stump wiggling behind my ass. My back hunches into an arch under her linen dinner jacket and the effect was that we look like a single woman with a lumpy hunchback, two disproportionately long legs and a mysterious fifth limb that could be a tail or the gaster of a giant ant. We are an entity that nobody but the vilest degenerate would find doable. It’s at this moment that a thin Chinese man in his fifties, whose eyes flutter with a pronounced effeminacy, gilded and regal as a celluloid closet star, pokes his head out of one of those organ-harvesting execution buses that go from prison to prison, then out to the cobbler fields.

“Hello pretty girl,” he says. “Do you need lift?”

Sickle flaps her mouth in such a manner that nothing matches the high-pitched whine squealing half-muffled from beneath her jacket.

“Oh kind sir! I am but a lowly street performer who seeks fame and fortune in Las Vegas or Fown, but I’m so, so hungry. I would do anything and I mean anything for a quick bite to eat.”

“How hung are you?” he asks.

“Not too young for you, stud.”

“What do you do in act?”

“I give this here vegetable a lap dance. I get as nude as indecent exposure laws will permit me. And then some.”

“Oooh. I like and then some. You get naked as duck in butcher window?”

“Honey, please, I make duck in window look like virginal school-girl.”

“I am intrigued and perhaps possibly aroused. All right. You get in back of van now.”

“You are simply too kind, sir. I have always benefited tremendously from the sexual neediness of strangers.”

“Do you need help with vegetable?” asks the Chinese man as he opens the driver side door.

I grab Sickle’s arm and pull it back against her head and we fall back so the only thing keeping the two of us upright is my other arm planted against the warm pavement, and Sickle now looks like a melodramatic plantation whore in some life-threatening woe, like perhaps she dropped a handkerchief, or will perhaps be encroached upon by a solar body.

“Oh please sir!” I moan. “This sun has become intolerable! I’m hotter’n a cross at a Klan rally!”

The Chinese man lets out a prolapsed evil laugh as he sashays contemptuously from the driver’s seat.

The doors at the back of the bus fly open and out walks a cute girl, probably about nineteen, flashing a toothy smile with both her mouth and her long necklace of human teeth. The driver hauls the girl in both arms and throws her to the girl. She stumbles backwards into darkness.

The driver turns to us and says, “Please get in.”

[movedwercs]

What in the ever-lovin' feck is THIS.

>It's a photo, but it's a doozy of one. It's a massive crack in the ground that Mercury's looking up from the bottom of, a fissure-turned stubby, jagged-canyon. The whole place seems to have been split from below with such force that it broke the ground itself. The place HAS to be Wayouddy, the rocks match the reddish brown of the planet's two biggest arid regions; the sky is right, too, and this time of day the planet looks up and into the tapering end of the galactic arm it calls home. Looming, arcing wisps of murky, periwinkle clouds seem to hang high above the sky, more like some kind of incomprehensibly massive object in the stars than like the thick canopy of black-gray clouds that usually come with Wayouddy's monsoons.

>But the fissure is wrong. No storm-clouds hang above the crack, yet the pounding gray sheets of monsoon rains persist, even while the absent sun seemingly beats down into the canyon. The thing is nearly as wide as it is long, and every square inch of soil is awash with jungle-life. Palm trees, rubber trees, nut trees... everything towers, or clambers over something else that towers. Trees overgrown with vines have emerged from the canopy and snapped under their own dead weight. Green, jagged teeth stick out of the jungle at every level in this microbiome, but so do shining white stone columns.

>As the reddish brown rocks, much more tan than the Flats, reaches the bottom of this place of humidity and heat and oppressive ambient pressure, the material composition of the stone gives way to a dull-white sandstone. The stuff's been quarried from below, all the way across from Merc's position, cut and polished into a gleaming shine that always catches the sourceless sunshine from above. The pillars are conical, driven through the jungle as if they were stakes, and carved to cast sharp shadows into menacing, monstrous faces.

>The biggest source of the worked stone has been erected, partially inside a carved overhang. The cave-quarry itself is a yawning thing that stretches nearly half a mile high, like a bite taken out of the side of this already gaping wound in the desert; cut block-by-block, giving the whole wide site a jagged look. Emerging from the quarry is a massive, gleaming Ziggurat, ten absolutely massive tiers of carved reliefs that emerge from the shadows and seem to glow, holding the unnatural daylight of the fissure and menacing the already oppressive atmosphere.

>Then Merc posts a second SERIES of photos, zooming in on the Ziggurat itself. Each tier appears to be around two or three stories on the inside, with windows barely perceptible amid relief carvings, scenes of violent battles (or slaughters), scenes of living sacrifices and burning towns and forests, atrocities always propagated under a leering demon's face in the air above each relief. The higher-up tiers in the photograph are somehow worse, as the glimmering-white sandstone is dulled by dried blood. More dried blood than anyone on a desert planet could ever bear to waste; more dried blood than a hundred grown men, farm-fattened like pigs, could ever spill.

>The upper tiers of blood-soaked scenes are scenes of defeat, retreat, and salted land and torn-down walls, giving way to cloaked figures in prayer around that omnipresent, demonic face, the only image left at the tip of the ziggurat. A tower emerges from the top floor, with an inset spiral staircase barely perceptible that leads up to a shining red table-top altar. Buried in the sharp shadows of the now extremely-close ceiling of the cave, the altar has its own inner light, as if the edges of the stone were shining with a white light made pink by the too-wet blood.

>In a word, even from across the multiverse, the photos of the Ziggurat are WRONG. The oppressive humidity and malicious intent can be felt the longer anyone looks at those looming, demonic faces, posted all over the jungle, all over the structure.

[thepaleys]

It was at Coburg during the autumn of 1891 that Mamma received news of the death of Uncle Paul's young wife. Grand Duke Paul was the youngest son of Alexander II and our mother's favourite brother. Hardly three years before he had married Alexandra of Greece, eldest daughter of King George and Queen Olga; and now "Alix", as we all called her, that sweet young wife and mother, was dead! The news came like a thunderbolt. Two Lovers, full of their young happiness, they had filled our quiet home with their Joy. A daughter had then already been born to them and it was at the birth of their second child, little Dmitri, that Alix had died. What a cruel, unnatural event. Alix was dead. Our guest so recently, that sweet, gay, happy young creature, she was no more. It was unbelievable. Could happiness be so quickly torn asunder and destroyed? Mamma decided on a hasty departure for St. Petersburg and that Ducky and I, the two eldest daughters, were to go with her. She wanted to be at the funeral, but above all she wanted to be with the brother she so dearly loved. How well I remember that funeral when young Alix was laid to rest alongside those who had gone before her. She was buried in the great church of the Peter and Paul fortress where, since Peter the Great, all the Tsars and their kith and kin had been interred. (...)

And here we were, all gathered together in this great, gloomy cathedral, to lay a young wife and mother in her untimely grave. Full of the pomp and splendour characteristic of all Russian ceremonies was that funeral. Stupendous chants rose to the vaults, echoing again from the fortress-like walls; there were thousands of lighted tapers, fumes of incense, and those thundering bass voices of the cantors which always made me hold my breath, wondering how human lungs could sustain such an effort without bursting. Clad in deepest mourning, with long black veils on their heads, stood the Empress, Grand Duchesses and Princesses, their dull black slashed by the bright ribbons of their respective orders, blue for the Empress, red for the grand duchesses, making their sombre apparel appear all the darker by contrast; and there was huge Uncle Sasha, surrounded by his enormous brothers, cousins and uncles, and as chief mourner, Uncle Paul, a little in front of the others. Frailer than his brothers, though just as tall, and marvellously slim, Uncle Paul was a different type darker and more gentle, he had soft brown eyes and the beautiful hands of his mother. In the white tunic and silver helmet of the Garde a Cheval, there was indeed something knight-like about him. I cannot remember if he wore this particular uniform at the funeral, but it was thus that I best member him, long and slim like a slender marble column, with his impressive voice and luminous eyes. A man full of human kindness and understanding, a man who always defended those who were being attacked, who was always fair towards others, a charming companion, gay and intelligent, it was not astonishing that of all her brothers Mamma loved Uncle Paul best.

I can still see him bending over the bier upon which his lovely young wife lay with crossed hands, against which leaned a small holy image we all had to kiss in turn, and with a thin white veil over her face. I remember the tears running down his cheeks and how Uncle Serge, his favourite brother, took him in his arms when he made a desperate gesture of protest when at last they laid the coffin lid over the sweet face he had loved. It was indeed a scene which made a deep impression upon the very young girls that we were then the grand setting, the flickering tapers, the flowers, the impressive chants, and above all the grief of that young husband who had to be torn away from the coffin of his bride. Tout passe.

Queen Marie of Romania - "Story of my Life"

[graysoncounty0]

Custom Garage Door Designs That Complement Grayson County Architecture

Your garage door is one of the most prominent exterior features of your home. It's not just a functional component—it’s a major design element that can enhance curb appeal, complement your home’s architecture, and even increase property value. In Grayson County, where homes range from rustic farmhouses to modern ranch-style builds, the right custom garage door design can truly set your property apart.

At Grayson County Door & Gate, we specialize in helping homeowners find or create garage doors that suit their home’s unique style. As a trusted garage door company, we’ve seen firsthand how the right design choice can transform an exterior from average to extraordinary. In this post, we’ll explore how different architectural styles found across Grayson County can benefit from specific garage door designs—and how to make the perfect selection for your home.

Why Custom Garage Doors Matter

Many homes are built using similar structural blueprints, but garage doors provide an opportunity for customization and distinction. A custom garage door allows you to:

Reflect your personal style

Complement architectural details

Improve curb appeal

Boost resale value

Enhance security and energy efficiency

Rather than settling for a one-size-fits-all option, a custom door from a reliable garage door company like Grayson County Door & Gate ensures your investment matches your home’s character and local aesthetic.

Popular Architectural Styles in Grayson County (and Matching Garage Doors)

Grayson County has a diverse mix of home styles—from historic homes in Denison and Sherman to modern new builds in growing communities. Here’s how to pair garage door designs with common local architectural styles:

1. Texas Ranch and Farmhouse Styles

These homes are known for wide front porches, natural stone, and earthy materials. You’ll find exposed wood beams and traditional gable roofs.

Garage Door Match:

Carriage-style garage doors with cross-beam detailing

Stained wood or wood-look composite finishes

Decorative hardware like hinges and handles

These details highlight the rustic charm and timeless appeal of the farmhouse aesthetic.

2. Modern Contemporary Homes

Newer homes in the area often favor clean lines, minimalism, and bold contrast in exterior colors and materials.

Garage Door Match:

Sleek aluminum and glass panel doors

Flush panels or full-view modern styles

Matte black or dark gray color schemes

These doors enhance the architectural geometry and add a modern edge while remaining functional and secure.

3. Craftsman-Style Homes

Craftsman homes, known for their handcrafted appearance, feature detailed woodwork, tapered columns, and covered porches.

Garage Door Match:

Traditional raised-panel doors with custom window inserts

Earth-toned finishes (greens, browns, taupe)

Symmetrical designs with balanced proportions

These doors help maintain the artistic craftsmanship and warm, welcoming feel of the home.

4. Colonial or Traditional Styles

These homes often have brick exteriors, shuttered windows, and a symmetrical layout.

Garage Door Match:

Classic panel doors with multi-lite windows

Solid, neutral colors like white, navy, or deep red

Arched top panels for added elegance

This design reinforces the timeless and dignified presence of traditional homes found throughout Grayson County.

Custom Features to Consider

Even within the same architectural category, no two homes are alike. At Grayson County Door & Gate, we work with you to customize every detail to suit your home. Here are some features you can personalize:

✅ Materials

Wood: Classic, warm, and ideal for rustic homes.

Steel: Durable and versatile, with options to mimic wood.

Aluminum: Lightweight and great for modern aesthetics.

Composite: Low-maintenance with the look of natural materials.

✅ Windows

Windows add elegance and natural light. Choose from:

Frosted or clear glass

Arched or rectangular shapes

Grilles or no grilles

✅ Colors and Finishes

Match your siding, trim, or front door for a cohesive look. Popular options include:

Stained woodgrain

Bold modern tones

Classic neutrals

✅ Hardware and Accents

Decorative handles, hinges, and clavos (nail heads) can turn a plain door into a design focal point.

Energy Efficiency and Functionality

Custom garage doors aren’t just about looks. Modern designs also offer energy-efficient features like:

Insulated panels to help control indoor temps

Weather sealing to block drafts

UV-resistant finishes to handle Texas sun

An insulated door from a quality garage door company like Grayson County Door & Gate can make a big difference in comfort and utility costs—especially in our hot summers and chilly winters.

The Role of a Professional Garage Door Company

Designing and installing a custom garage door is not a DIY project. Choosing the right design is just the first step—you also need expert installation to ensure smooth operation and long-term durability.

When you work with Grayson County Door & Gate, you get:

A personalized design consultation

Recommendations based on your home's style and budget

Access to top-quality brands and materials

Skilled installation from licensed professionals

Ongoing support and expert garage door repair services

Our team brings years of experience in working with Grayson County homeowners to create doors that are both beautiful and functional.

How to Start the Custom Garage Door Process

Not sure where to begin? Here’s a simple step-by-step guide to upgrading your garage door:

Schedule a Consultation: We’ll come out to your property, assess your current door, and discuss your goals and preferences.

Choose a Style and Material: We’ll help you pick a design that complements your home and fits your budget.

Select Custom Options: Windows, hardware, colors, insulation—every element is customizable.

Installation: Our expert crew will handle everything from removal of your old door to professional installation of the new one.

Maintenance and Support: We offer ongoing tune-ups and garage door repair if anything goes wrong.

Final Thoughts

Your garage door shouldn’t be an afterthought—it should be a seamless extension of your home’s architecture. Whether you live in a modern build, a charming craftsman cottage, or a sprawling ranch-style home, the right custom garage door can elevate your entire exterior.

At Grayson County Door & Gate, we’re more than just a garage door company—we’re your partners in design, security, and functionality. Let us help you create a door that enhances your home’s beauty while delivering the performance and protection you need.

Ready to explore your custom garage door options? Contact Grayson County Door & Gate today for a free design consultation and let’s build something beautiful together.

[tameblog]

Welcome to Field Guide, a column by Sami Reiss of Snake covering all-time design and where you can find it. At a recent edition of Salone del Mobile in Milan, Cassina, the Italian furniture company, debuted a light by Ray and Charles Eames that had never been put into production before. Working behind the scenes of the release of the Galaxy, a 1949 design that Eames Office had been working on introducing since the 1980s, was Form Portfolios, a licensing company that opened shop expressly to make designer midcentury furnishings more accessible to the era’s aficionados. For that crowd, Form’s efforts, along with those of legacy producers, are today creating a refreshed retail environment for historic design objects: some originally made only in small numbers, others that may have been produced at grand scale but went out of production, and, in the case of the Galaxy, those that were never created to begin with. These objects now give the vehement design lover other options besides shelling out five figures for a vintage piece, or competing against other buyers at auction in hopes of a deal on one. At Salone del Mobile in 2023, Cassina debuted the Galaxy light, a 1949 design by Ray and Charles Eames.For Form’s founder and CEO, Mark Masiello, seeing through the release of the Galaxy and more objects like it comes out of a "pure love for design and a desire to bring innovation to the industry," he says. An avid furniture collector who was working in private equity, Masiello began Form, based in Rhode Island and Copenhagen, in 2017 after taking a tour of Hans Wegner’s studio. A long-time collector of Wegner’s, Masiello was moved by a folder containing designs for the Wishbone chair, and dismayed by the spare fashion in which the studio was operating. "It was just one family member," Masiello says, "part-time, three days a week." It was clear the archive was languishing: despite Wegner’s name and body of work, the family didn’t know what to do. "If an artist makes music," Masiello explains, "a music publisher manages these rights—but that doesn’t exist in the design world." Or it didn’t before: Form, Masiello says, has put 600-plus pieces into production by connecting families with producers. (In furniture, generally, a designer owns a design and licenses it to a furniture company, which then produces it. Myriad factors, though—including the death of a designer—determine whether it remains in production.) Most notably, the firm helped return Paul McCobb’s work to the market after a several-decades-long absence. While he was among the most popular designers of the 1950s and ’60s—his disarmingly simple tapered-leg chairs and desks were often modular, and built out the midcentury home and office aesthetic—times changed, and his pieces fell out of production. And over the past several years, the McCobb heirs, through Form, have returned the designer’s work back into wide availability under several different makers. CB2, notably, has reintroduced several designs by McCobb, many of them from his Irwin collection and others a selection of Bowtie seating. Designed in 1952, Paul McCobb’s C7806 coffee table from CB2 is hewn from American white oak and Arabescato marble.The process for bringing some of these objects to market can be lengthy. To update Eames’s Helena light, originally created for a church in Arkansas, Eames Demetrios, Ray and Charles’s grandson and the Eames Office’s director, says he spent 200 hours interviewing people, including churchgoers, who were close to the object in some way. Recreating other items is more straightforward: Hem, a Finnish design brand, is responsible for a faithful remake of Yrjö Kukkapuro’s Experiment chair. (Having debuted at Salone del Mobile in 1982, the chair itself isn’t midcentury, but Kukkapuro is of that era.) On its own, Eames Office handles the creation of some of Ray and Charles’s designs, like an elephant toy that was never put into production until recently. As with that instance, sometimes items are rolled out with an eye toward younger consumers, or those who are new to design. "The elephants were part of that," says Demetrios, an "entryway into design." Bigger furniture makers also have their own archival operations. MillerKnoll, which comprises Herman Miller and Knoll, has an archives department that dates back to 1923, when the Herman Miller Furniture Company was founded. (Founder and executive D.J. DePree’s assistant, Hannah Mae Borst, started saving material from then that would form the archive collections.) The current archive is about "one third production-focused," says Amy Auscherman, who directs its operations. It comprises everything from marketing materials to fabric swatches to prototypes of old pieces never sent into production—often purchased by Auscherman on auction websites—as well as drawings and sketches that make up what she calls "records of design." The archives’s prototypes, old models, and swatches give MillerKnoll’s engineers an exact guideline of how to remake classic designs. "Here’s how it’s upholstered, here’s how its legs are attached," Auscherman says. Tech is sometimes involved: for a set of recently rereleased Gilbert Rohde tables, Herman Miller contracted a 3D-scanning expert within Michigan’s automotive industry to capture the 1941 tables before handing them off to engineers. Ultimately, the breadth and depth of the archives allow for what Auscherman describes as "a faithful update that’s not a departure"—furniture that speaks to the original items, but which might require different materials or production techniques due to time having passed since the original was produced. Herman Miller reproduces coffee and side tables by Gilbert Rohde, the company’s first design director.Which was true with Eames’s elephant toy: originally produced in 1945 in plywood as a prototype, it was officially introduced in 2020 in that material, and then produced at scale in plastic. "It took two materials to capture the vision," says Demetrios. "The plastic elephant is much more affordable—who’s going to let their kid play with that expensive [plywood] elephant?"Outside of collaborations with Form Portfolios or Cassina, Eames Office regulates and preserves the legacy of Charles and Ray Eames, oftentimes deciding which design objects from the couple’s massive back catalog to prioritize and re-release. Demetrios says the archive is massive—for reference, it includes 150,000 prints—and so not every project is chosen, but that the goal is to keep it going, honor the legacy, and make the future-looking and timeless items available to future generations. "The difference between design and art," says Demetrios, "is that if a designer designs something, they want to continue it after their death. As long as people are responding to these designs, the [Eames] designs would be available."Well-executed retro productions, like the Helena church lamp, the elephant, or Hem’s Kukkapuro, hint at a new sort of market, or maybe an old one: A retail environment where futuristic, accessible, minimal lamps and chairs are more available via scaled production. They might not be vintage, but the McCobb and Eames reproductions created in good faith by license holders have their own air of authenticity. For those who are getting into design, it might offer an explanation of why we can’t just buy cool old furniture like we buy Levi’s. For design diehards, knowing an object has a pedigree might just be enough to give it pride of place.— It’s possible that nothing can replace the thrill of scoring an original piece at auction—but constantly scouring sites can turn into a black hole of a hobby. Here’s where to get the next best thing right now.Yrjö Kukkapuro’s Experiment chairAn avant-garde masterpiece from 1982, the Experiment was always easier to acquire in Europe than in North America. A recent reproduction by Hem gets the details right, is available in a number of colors and has, for retail furniture with a point of view, a refreshingly accessible price.Exposior Pendant by Paul McCobb for CB2 Originally designed in 1951 by McCobb, this minimal piece glides well with other aesthetics and styles, and the midnight blue makes it stand out from other midcentury furnishings. Plus, it’s priced well. Eames Plastic Elephant All that can be understood about Eames can be discovered through any one of their pieces, and the new elephant, originally developed in plywood in 1945, exists perfectly as a retro, with every detail and wrinkle perfectly expressed. It’s pored over, but still kinetic. Source link

[ramestoryworld]

Welcome to Field Guide, a column by Sami Reiss of Snake covering all-time design and where you can find it. At a recent edition of Salone del Mobile in Milan, Cassina, the Italian furniture company, debuted a light by Ray and Charles Eames that had never been put into production before. Working behind the scenes of the release of the Galaxy, a 1949 design that Eames Office had been working on introducing since the 1980s, was Form Portfolios, a licensing company that opened shop expressly to make designer midcentury furnishings more accessible to the era’s aficionados. For that crowd, Form’s efforts, along with those of legacy producers, are today creating a refreshed retail environment for historic design objects: some originally made only in small numbers, others that may have been produced at grand scale but went out of production, and, in the case of the Galaxy, those that were never created to begin with. These objects now give the vehement design lover other options besides shelling out five figures for a vintage piece, or competing against other buyers at auction in hopes of a deal on one. At Salone del Mobile in 2023, Cassina debuted the Galaxy light, a 1949 design by Ray and Charles Eames.For Form’s founder and CEO, Mark Masiello, seeing through the release of the Galaxy and more objects like it comes out of a "pure love for design and a desire to bring innovation to the industry," he says. An avid furniture collector who was working in private equity, Masiello began Form, based in Rhode Island and Copenhagen, in 2017 after taking a tour of Hans Wegner’s studio. A long-time collector of Wegner’s, Masiello was moved by a folder containing designs for the Wishbone chair, and dismayed by the spare fashion in which the studio was operating. "It was just one family member," Masiello says, "part-time, three days a week." It was clear the archive was languishing: despite Wegner’s name and body of work, the family didn’t know what to do. "If an artist makes music," Masiello explains, "a music publisher manages these rights—but that doesn’t exist in the design world." Or it didn’t before: Form, Masiello says, has put 600-plus pieces into production by connecting families with producers. (In furniture, generally, a designer owns a design and licenses it to a furniture company, which then produces it. Myriad factors, though—including the death of a designer—determine whether it remains in production.) Most notably, the firm helped return Paul McCobb’s work to the market after a several-decades-long absence. While he was among the most popular designers of the 1950s and ’60s—his disarmingly simple tapered-leg chairs and desks were often modular, and built out the midcentury home and office aesthetic—times changed, and his pieces fell out of production. And over the past several years, the McCobb heirs, through Form, have returned the designer’s work back into wide availability under several different makers. CB2, notably, has reintroduced several designs by McCobb, many of them from his Irwin collection and others a selection of Bowtie seating. Designed in 1952, Paul McCobb’s C7806 coffee table from CB2 is hewn from American white oak and Arabescato marble.The process for bringing some of these objects to market can be lengthy. To update Eames’s Helena light, originally created for a church in Arkansas, Eames Demetrios, Ray and Charles’s grandson and the Eames Office’s director, says he spent 200 hours interviewing people, including churchgoers, who were close to the object in some way. Recreating other items is more straightforward: Hem, a Finnish design brand, is responsible for a faithful remake of Yrjö Kukkapuro’s Experiment chair. (Having debuted at Salone del Mobile in 1982, the chair itself isn’t midcentury, but Kukkapuro is of that era.) On its own, Eames Office handles the creation of some of Ray and Charles’s designs, like an elephant toy that was never put into production until recently. As with that instance, sometimes items are rolled out with an eye toward younger consumers, or those who are new to design. "The elephants were part of that," says Demetrios, an "entryway into design." Bigger furniture makers also have their own archival operations. MillerKnoll, which comprises Herman Miller and Knoll, has an archives department that dates back to 1923, when the Herman Miller Furniture Company was founded. (Founder and executive D.J. DePree’s assistant, Hannah Mae Borst, started saving material from then that would form the archive collections.) The current archive is about "one third production-focused," says Amy Auscherman, who directs its operations. It comprises everything from marketing materials to fabric swatches to prototypes of old pieces never sent into production—often purchased by Auscherman on auction websites—as well as drawings and sketches that make up what she calls "records of design." The archives’s prototypes, old models, and swatches give MillerKnoll’s engineers an exact guideline of how to remake classic designs. "Here’s how it’s upholstered, here’s how its legs are attached," Auscherman says. Tech is sometimes involved: for a set of recently rereleased Gilbert Rohde tables, Herman Miller contracted a 3D-scanning expert within Michigan’s automotive industry to capture the 1941 tables before handing them off to engineers. Ultimately, the breadth and depth of the archives allow for what Auscherman describes as "a faithful update that’s not a departure"—furniture that speaks to the original items, but which might require different materials or production techniques due to time having passed since the original was produced. Herman Miller reproduces coffee and side tables by Gilbert Rohde, the company’s first design director.Which was true with Eames’s elephant toy: originally produced in 1945 in plywood as a prototype, it was officially introduced in 2020 in that material, and then produced at scale in plastic. "It took two materials to capture the vision," says Demetrios. "The plastic elephant is much more affordable—who’s going to let their kid play with that expensive [plywood] elephant?"Outside of collaborations with Form Portfolios or Cassina, Eames Office regulates and preserves the legacy of Charles and Ray Eames, oftentimes deciding which design objects from the couple’s massive back catalog to prioritize and re-release. Demetrios says the archive is massive—for reference, it includes 150,000 prints—and so not every project is chosen, but that the goal is to keep it going, honor the legacy, and make the future-looking and timeless items available to future generations. "The difference between design and art," says Demetrios, "is that if a designer designs something, they want to continue it after their death. As long as people are responding to these designs, the [Eames] designs would be available."Well-executed retro productions, like the Helena church lamp, the elephant, or Hem’s Kukkapuro, hint at a new sort of market, or maybe an old one: A retail environment where futuristic, accessible, minimal lamps and chairs are more available via scaled production. They might not be vintage, but the McCobb and Eames reproductions created in good faith by license holders have their own air of authenticity. For those who are getting into design, it might offer an explanation of why we can’t just buy cool old furniture like we buy Levi’s. For design diehards, knowing an object has a pedigree might just be enough to give it pride of place.— It’s possible that nothing can replace the thrill of scoring an original piece at auction—but constantly scouring sites can turn into a black hole of a hobby. Here’s where to get the next best thing right now.Yrjö Kukkapuro’s Experiment chairAn avant-garde masterpiece from 1982, the Experiment was always easier to acquire in Europe than in North America. A recent reproduction by Hem gets the details right, is available in a number of colors and has, for retail furniture with a point of view, a refreshingly accessible price.Exposior Pendant by Paul McCobb for CB2 Originally designed in 1951 by McCobb, this minimal piece glides well with other aesthetics and styles, and the midnight blue makes it stand out from other midcentury furnishings. Plus, it’s priced well. Eames Plastic Elephant All that can be understood about Eames can be discovered through any one of their pieces, and the new elephant, originally developed in plywood in 1945, exists perfectly as a retro, with every detail and wrinkle perfectly expressed. It’s pored over, but still kinetic. Source link