Smoke Signals

That boulder must be a meteorite, black and shiny and of an unimaginable weight. God knows how it got to stand at the corner of the Rue de l’Horloge, where my neighbour, face of a wrinkled walnut, woolly stockings and clogs, sat on fine summer days and watched the world go by.

I awoke each morning to the squeak and groan as she opened her shutters, and settled down each evening to the squeak and groan as she closed them again. The smoke from her chimney was a different matter, a yellowish cloud with a whiff of “ordures”. I might have complained to the Mairie, but returning one springtime I didn’t need to. As impossible as it seemed, the shutters squeaked and groaned, the chimney smoked no more, and the meteorite was an empty throne.

I looked in vain in the cemetery for her grave. But seen from my terrace, as swifts and swallows wheeled and screamed in the radiant evening light, how black that chimney appeared.

Spontaneous combustion. What else.