Afterword

I will wait just inside the door to the underworld for you. That gray-black stone tile thick with dust, just before the sudden descent (rollercoaster angle) is where I will crouch and breathe on my hands for warmth. I will wait for you, so that we will go down together, to introduce each other as a good man and a good woman among the milling souls of the recently dead. I think they will greet us as people always do when thrust together into a situation strange, worrisome, but calm enough and free enough from signs of peril that panic does not seem a natural response. I think they will welcome us, and ask us what we think, and if we have any news from the world above. And they will already know the answer before it leaves our lips: No, sorry, it doesn't look like the government's going to send relief anytime soon. The living world, like a howling blizzard, will cease to seem like a thing to return to, and we'll all begin exploring the uncharted lanes of what comes next. We will move down the subterranean mountain (whose mountain? I've heard this before) carrying the coals of a future hearth to where existence opens, the plains of the waiting flowers.