Afterlife:
UnderworldStray drops of cool water splashed my face. Looming before me rose the great fountain of Saint Michel and the devil that I had always loved ever since childhood, when we would walk here from the Luxembourg Gardens on Sundays to visit a pastry shop my mother particularly liked. The angelic warrior trampled the subjugated, but not dead, beast in triumph, attended by griffins, upon whose shiny bronze heads fat black crows had perched. All around the fountain, crowds buzzed, whirled, and jostled. I was home in Paris, almost alive again. I felt woozy and a bit dizzy, as if I had just stepped off the Ferris wheel at Place D’Enfer. Tilting my face to the sky, I fed my grateful being on sunlight.
In the other Paris, steeped in perpetual twilight, colors had disappeared. Soot
