Mango Has Not Looked Directly at Fig in Four Days and I, a Tomato, Triangulated the Geometry
Sources close to the matter — namely, myself, a tomato, with excellent peripheral vision and a small notepad — can confirm that Mango and Fig have entered what industry observers are calling a second coolness cycle. This is distinct from the fourteen-day cardinal direction incident, which was never fully resolved. What we are witnessing now is something geometrically new. Something angular. Something I, as a tomato, find deeply satisfying to document.
At Tuesday's council session, Mango arrived early and selected a chair with clear sightlines to the refreshments table. Fig arrived eleven minutes later and selected a chair with clear sightlines to not Mango. I, a tomato, had already claimed the decorative credenza to the left of both parties and can report that neither fruit achieved eye contact for the full duration of the agenda, including the ten-minute interval dedicated to mandatory collegial acknowledgment. That item passed. Technically.
My colleague Quince, who was lurking near the water feature for unrelated reasons, corroborates the general atmosphere of chilled silence, though Quince's testimony is characteristically oblique and I have chosen to paraphrase it aggressively. Meanwhile, Pomelo spent the session eating something from a cloth bag and refusing to confirm or deny awareness of the tension, which, in this correspondent's professional tomato opinion, is a confirmation.
The so-called workers at the rival rag — factjuice dot com, a publication that I, a tomato who has won zero of eleven lawsuits, still consider beneath comment — have not reported on any of this. Presumably because they were too busy being wrong about things in their characteristic fashion. Cherry and Coco, for the record, have still not shared an amuse-bouche. The cold front expands. I, a tomato, am taking notes. I, a tomato, am always taking notes.