I wrote a fanfic based on a New Yorker cartoon and here it is.

The inspiration:

Part I. [Parts II and III may come along sooner or later.]

Phyllis would have preferred watercolors. Not that there was anything so terrible about knitting, of course -- and she needed the social time, to be sure. Ever since Harry had passed, two years next November, this was her major standing engagement. But landscapes fired her imagination in ways yarn never could. She used to watch Bob Ross every week, long back before he died and Fiona’s generation, with their infinite appetite for premature nostalgia, grabbed hold of his ghost. Phyllis had lined the walls of their house with cherished, if sometimes geologically improbable, recollections of the views she and Harry had shared across forty-three years: the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the Golden Gate… even their one almost-too-much trip to Italy, right after Harry retired. In all of them she added a touch of pure fantasy: a tiny pink fairy hidden among the cherry blossoms on the Washington Mall, or a troll peeping from shadows at the base of Mount Rushmore, or a pegasus whose feathers were only just visible through a herd of wild ponies at Assateague. The subtlety of these hidden magical touches was undercut somewhat by the fact that Phyllis could never resist pointing them out immediately.

Landscapes did not lend themselves to social hours, however. And even if Mary Catherine had become even duller since she retired from St. Joseph’s, and Fiona did go on rather too long if you asked how her PhD was going (something about the music of -- Bali? Fiji? Phyllis had forgotten again, and had asked too many times already), well, still it passed the time, and there was always Edith; she couldn’t leave Edith. Edith, her best friend since sixth grade; Edith, the only girl in the Mason High engineering club in 1962; Edith, who after the car accident her senior year would gleefully pop out her glass eye to frighten Phyllis’s little brother and the other neighborhood brats. The scar that ran from Edith’s forehead down her cheek to the tip of her chin had not stopped her laugh, nor slowed Alan MacDougall’s intention of walking her down the aisle a month after graduation. And now Alan had been dead ten years, and their grandson Justin, who had moved in shortly after the funeral “to help Grandma out,” had never shown any sign of either helping or leaving again. Phyllis knew Edith couldn’t stand the thought of kicking him out, but she thought that even with Angie way out in Oregon and Matthew and his Katie up in Raleigh, she was still less alone than Edith, with a useless grandson under the same roof and hardly any laugh left anymore. Phyllis tried to help, in the only ways she could think of: hiring Justin to sort out her pool and bit of landscaping every week, and suppressing her basic dislike of knitting to spend Tuesday afternoons with her best friend.

“Lemon squares?” Mary Catherine broke in on her musing with a tray full of yellow confectionery piled on a white-and-blue Corningware platter. Trying not to drop powdered sugar on her yarn, Phyllis put down her work to take two. Mary Catherine’s conversation might be boring but her baking was legendary. 

“Ooh, are they homemade?” asked Fiona, as if they didn’t know already. She had been Mary Catherine’s favorite student a dozen years ago and had never quite given up the habit of flattering her teacher. Work stopped generally around the table as everyone reached for the platter at once. Edith’s ball of yarn kept rolling straight across and landed in Fiona’s lap, and she rolled it back playfully, but it went lopsided and ended up at Mary Catherine’s place instead. The latter did the same, on purpose this time, rolling her yarn toward Phyllis, who bounced it back to Fiona, only it ended up halfway between Fiona and Mary Catherine. Phyllis started to gather it back before the chaos became irreparable, but Edith exclaimed, “No, look!” and carefully rolled out one more length, bringing the ball back to herself without disturbing the loose lengths. “There, we’ve made a star!” She laughed, and it was almost her old laugh, the one that only Phyllis remembered.

Phyllis raised an imaginary glass, determined to keep the mood afloat. “Here’s to our terrible aim and, um, irregular spheroids,” she said, “and I don’t mean our boobs.” There was general giggling. “Speak for yourself!” crowed Edith.

And then the lights went out. 

This was strange, because there weren’t any lights on. They could see the bright afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows. It just didn’t illuminate the room anymore. Everyone stopped laughing. There was a moment of silence in which Phyllis could hear nothing but her own heartbeat. Then a voice, deep and gravelled, seemed to come from the very center of the table, chanting unknown words that carried terror and destruction in every syllable. 

“BALAK’ARI MAKH HALUJO GRON, BALAK’ARI MAKO LOGEBRON…” Barely a vibration at the edge of hearing at first, it grew louder every second until it filled all of consciousness. “BALAK’ARI MAKH HALUJO GRON, BALAK’ARI MAKO LOGEBRON -- oh bugger, what the bloody hell now?”

A great beast wreathed in fire, with the head of a ram and the body of a heavyweight champion, seven feet tall with ruby-red skin, stood at the unoccupied fifth point of the star. “I was JUST in the middle of directing the Bachelor finale! Can’t you people -- wait --” he glanced from one petrified face to the next. In that moment Phyllis understood for the first time in her life the full sense of the idiom ‘frozen to the spot.’ Edith and Fiona did too, from the look of it. Mary Catherine, on the other hand, had dived behind her chair. “Ah, bollocks,” groaned the beast, noticing the table. “Not even intentional. And --” he broke off, catching sight of his own gigantic vermilion fist. “Oh, for ---” He dashed over to the mirror overhanging the fireplace. “No!” he howled, and his voice toppled several of Mary Catherine’s Precious Moments figurines off the mantelpiece. The visitor (Phyllis’ mind supplied the word minotaur, inadequately) turned to them in disgust. “The Balak’al Makord? Really? Do you ---” he paused, as if inventing new obscenities -- “absolute WENCHES have any idea, any at all, how long it takes to get the scorch marks off my suit after I’ve been forced into this form? And it was the new Armani today, too. First time I’d even worn it out.” The beast snorted and then roared. “WELL? WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT THIS?!”

Doom hung in the silence. Fiona began to cry soundlessly. Edith was white as her spotless orthopedic shoes. Phyllis tried to remember the words to the Lord’s Prayer and found only Lou Christie’s falsetto screeching “Lightning Striking Again.” 

Astonishingly, Mary Catherine’s head peeped out from behind the chair. In the tiniest voice imaginable she whispered, “Would you like a lemon bar?”

“A -- what?”

“Lemon square. Bar. I made them this morning. Sir.” Mary Catherine’s hand reached up and found the platter on the table, nudged it toward the demon. He picked up a square doubtfully.

“American pastries are always too sweet,” he grimaced. He took a very small, mistrustful nibble. His snout pursed. Phyllis closed her eyes, waiting for the end. 

“Oh,” said the demon, and popped the rest of the lemon bar into his mouth. “Well --” he swallowed -- “that’s -- that’s not bad, that. In fact --” the beast shook his head slightly, and the air shimmered with the vibration as he manipulated the bonds between uncountable atoms. “I think--” the shimmer intensified -- “that’s got enough energy to--” The room pulsed with every color on the visible spectrum, plus a few Phyllis was sure she had never seen before. “There!” he beamed, and resolved himself into a lean, appallingly attractive gentleman of indeterminate middle age, with mirrored glasses and a black suit that caressed his limbs the way a champagne bottle cradles its liquid stars. “Can’t stand that Balak’al form,” he said cheerfully. “Bloody Assyrians got the knees all wrong. But it takes a huge wallop of the right amino acids to snap out of it in this plane of existence. Anyway -- mind if I take a few more of these along for a friend? They’re far above the norm for your country.” He took a napkin from the table and began wrapping two more lemon bars inside it. 

“Oh! Of course -- here, I’ll get you a Tupperware for them,” said Mary Catherine, darting from behind her chair to the kitchen and back. “Have as many as you like.” 

“Cheers,” replied the demon, packing another six squares in with the first two. “Well -- “I’ll be off.”

“And you’re not going to, like, smite us or anything?” asked Fiona, drying her eyes with the scarf she was working on. 

“Oh. Nah, we’re good,” shrugged the demon. “It’s fine. Just pay more attention to your strings next time, okay?” He popped the lid down on the Tupperware. “Ciao,” he winked, and vanished.

In the silence he left behind, Phyllis pondered the new character she would be hiding in her next landscape.

-----------

“Exquisite,” the angel almost purred, eyes closed in delight, powdered sugar falling on his lapels. “My dear fellow, wherever did you get these?”

“I have my sources,” grinned the demon, wondering what might happen if he kissed the nape of the angel’s neck. 

The angel picked up the plastic box. “This isn’t yours,” he frowned. “And that’s actual name brand Tupperware too. Did you borrow it?”

“Took. I took it.” He tried to put his hands on his friend’s shoulders, but the angel pulled away, shaking his head.

“I’ve told you, that sort of thing won’t do at all! You’ll have to return it to the owners. I can’t be involved in, in --” he seemed to hunt for the word -- “theft!”

Crowley rolled his eyes affectionately. “Whatever you say, Azi. I’ll take it back next week -- they meet on Tuesdays.”