The Inferno

but with everyone who ever doubted you swapped for the Florentine nobles with their heads caught in eternally refreshed chamberpots, and your sister’s friends who wouldn’t look at you whipped by randy demons, is an assignment I resent, along with the directive, “and make sure it’s just as good—twice as good actually—as the original,” which alas I can’t decline or pretend anymore to be incapable of, though, being headless, I'm at liberty to doubt, if only based on the prompt, that you’ve read the original, since high school anyway, and that you’d really thank me for burdening you with a work of such genius as to leave no doubt that your doubters and sister’s friends, your humiliations and fortitude, can be the stuff of a proper and poignant universe not easy, you may find, to resist pressing on everyone you meet, who these days alas have their own private masterworks from which to look blearily up at us, eyes, like yours, pleading Come with me and I’ll show you, as if, at this hour, we could decently escort them anywhere but home.