A snippet

            The corridor led into a column of rooms: each resembling the quiet corner of a living room. There were bookshelves densely packed with not books but people, what remained of them—their ashes encased in bronze book-like containers with book-like spines inscribed with their names. Perhaps the room was not a living room at all but a private study of somebody with money. I saw in a glass case his reading glasses. Beside them sat his framed portrait.

            Some rooms led into smaller corridors, their archways slightly different from one another. Cool cement, patterned with perennials—cinquefoil—five leaves and sometimes seven. I stood on the middle step of one and looked up at the tunnel’s skeleton. The vaulted supports were so richly decorated so that their ornament concealed their function, their necessity. The spaces in the ribbed tunnels were sometimes filled with the same book-like containers filled with ashes. Memories of years past concealed in the concrete structure. This was a destination for old souls, a place of meditation.