The Rage of Paris

A porcelain heiress, Joan Coolidge, is auctioned off to matrimonial bondage by a matriarch who mistakes obedience for virtue; the groom, a gargoyle of entitlement, bruises more than champagne flutes. She vanishes, a ghost in steamer-trunk silk, and re-materialises on Montparnasse’s cobblestones where her grief is hammered into arabesques—every plié a repudiation, every entrechat a dare. Overnight, the city’s painters worship her as ‘The Rage of Paris,’ a living canvas whose collarbones catch moonlight like guillotine blades. Across the Seine, her pre-marital beloved—now desert-tanned, Bedouin-scarred, nostrils still flared with the cordite of Mesopotamian surveys—spots her oil-image in a salon and pursues the pigment to the flesh. Their reunion is a tango of recrimination and desire beneath café awnings that drip absinthe rain. When the engineer is summoned back to dunes that shift like treachery, Joan follows, suitcase stuffed with tutus and trepidation. The husband, trailing like a bloodhound with a gold-leaf leash, storms the Sahara only to be swallowed by a khaki cyclone; a deranged guide mistakes him for a djinn and ends the hunt with a rusted khanjar. Wind howls, sand scours guilt away, and the survivors—two bodies, one shared heartbeat—walk toward a horizon that finally stands still.