Hades Baedeker
by Ken Chen

Places of Interest

Any visitor to the afterlife will notice how hell’s landscape is excessively possible. Since death is fundamentally uncreative, the dead territories have been requisitioned from those of the living. The paper-windowed residences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the villages of Indochina and the adjoining jungles wheezing from poison, bulldozed Palestinian homes reconstituted in Tartarus brick by brick, so many streets and buildings, trees and vegetation relocated here by those pinnacles of Western civilization, the bomb and development. Even the most casual tourist to hell will notice the curious spatiality of Hades, the dead geography being simply history.

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