That afternoon, walking in the garden, the prince came face to face with Death. “Why,” he asked, “did you make a threatening gesture at my gardener this morning?” “It wasn’t a threatening gesture,” answered Death. “It was a gesture of surprise. I saw him far from Ispahan this morning and I knew I must take him in Ispahan tonight.”

another one! “Death and the Gardener” by Jean Cocteau, fits in two posts:

A young gardener said to his prince, “Save me! I met Death in the garden this morning and he made a menacing gesture. Tonight I wish by some miracle I could be far away, in Ispahan”. The prince lent him his swiftest horse.

going back for more Black Water, “Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties” ( https://www.fulltextarchive.com/book/Enoch-Soames/) is fun both as a story and as motivation for silly nonsense (cw: spoiler,: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/a-memory-of-the-nineteen-nineties/376995/)

(if you haven’t made risotto m. recently, that’s about a hundred bucks worth of saffron. when I buy it at the grocery store I can get a hundredth of an ounce in a weird little bag for seven bucks)

i’m sitting here watching this old jacques pepin video, he’s making a risotto milanese (with american brown rice), and he gets to the saffron and just whips out a tin that has an ounce of god damned saffron in it, lmao ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5vUuLh3ASQ)