Maybe it was the witchcraft of soprano's note;or the cry of an an ancient curse (or would it be blessing?) but something unexplained had driven him, crawling and weakened years underneath the soil, out of his grave and through a world he did not recognise. Gripping with some mysteriously summoned power along the ground for the distance he could muster, guided by the familiar light of the swollen moon on an otherwise unfamiliar world, before passing out, blind to the strange modernity of his surroundings. And maybe it was sheer fate, or a blessing of her own, that had meant it was Florence Soprano who found Joris here, slumped on the footpath and naked of spine where the flesh on his back had long vanished. She runs her hand over it, feels each knuckle of his spine beneath the soft skin of her own delicate hands, and dares to pull him in a little closer, aware in spite of her supposed pragmatism that this is more that this is more than just a corpse. A story flashes through her mind, briefly, of a similar case on a shore of some far flung Latin country. She has no fear, simply an odd compulsion, wrapping around her as if Joris was her duty, the peak of her job as mortician, to inspect him further, to see what could be repaired of his decaying frame. She moves the hair, which in death has grown wild and primitive, away from his face, and finds that perhaps it is not a job for bare hands as she attempts to peel it it away from the gaping hole in the side of his forehead and runs and shamefully into part of his face and the majority of one side of his neck. For the most part, Joris' face was remarkably well-preserved, as if by some kind of astonishing act of magick preparing him for this moment. Inspecting this sea of exotic potential which is Joris' mere being, Florence finds herself aware of her own relative ordinariness. She turns her head over with the care of a lapidotremist, aware of the fragility of his skin, and craves the moment his eyes will open (for now, she is convinced it will arrive.) The mouth sits untouched by decay and instead is as blessed in death as it was in life, inviting like a forbidden banquet, ripe like the promise of a flourishing orchard. Uncertain about the invasive nature of bringing her own mouth onto it, Florence kisses her own fingertips and places them onto Joris' lower lip, moving the flat of her hand then softly along what looks like the skin of the seven seas. When he opens his eyes, the sight of Florence is not comparable to anything he has seen in his waking life; whereas in the twenty-first century there is nothing particularly noticeable about Florence, to the historical eye of Joris there is a feel of the unknown, the exotic in the thick fringe cut into her hair, the shortness of her hemline creating a glimpse of inner thigh (already, to this old rakes eye, a promise land) and the smell of her beaten-up well worn jacket, a jacket he will sometimes come to wear himself, though it sits ill-fittingly exposing his barely-there wrists, when he wants to feel close to Florence. Perhaps, subconsciously, he has also picked up on the scent of death which Florence does her very best to mask, understanding how the fragarances of workplaces could cling. As a biology student she has spent three evenings a week behind a bar and could never rid herself of the smell of the innocuous dishwasher; if that was the case, then what on Earth would the staying power of something as overriding and eternal as death itself be? But something, somewhere, perhaps her connection to death, perhaps something more flattering, had driven him in Florence's direction, and her natural altruism as much as her attraction and intrigue could not let that go. Her main concern now is simply how she will get him home...
