In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

"Yeah, let me show you something."
They entered a hall of goddesses and athletes. At the very end
towered Michelangelo's giant pair of slaves.
But Ula appeared to change her mind and went straight to a
window, settling herself against the sill. Out the window was an
incongruously weedy courtyard, strewn with a couple of overturned
plastic buckets and a tumbledown shed. A scruffy calico cat crept along
the heavy rusted grates of the basement windows.
Penny thought of those famous paintings by Hubert Robert, of
the Grande Gallerie fantastically renovated with enormous skylights,
and idyllic gentlefolk admiring and copying the masterpieces, and its
companion piece, the Grande Gallerie in ruins, overgrown with weeds,
the roof caved in, peasants cooking over a bonfire next to
Michelangelo's Dying Slave, the same one as at the end of the
enormous room.
Ula took a wrinkled apple from her bag. The calico spotted his
victim among the weeds. As sparrows chased each other around the
shed. The cat pounced on his prey.
"Lunch mouse for kitty," Ula said with glee and bit into the
apple. "When I was a girl," she continued, her mouth full of apple bits,
"before the Mona Lisa was encased in bulletproof plastic long before I
M Pei hammered his glass stake into the building's heart, I would
wander here for days. Did you know they had secret staircases? There
was a spiral one that ended up in those dark little Bosch and Breughel
rooms. Yeah, and downstairs, the Egyptian mummies were all lined up
in rows like cargo waiting shipment to the afterlife. This courtyard'll be
next."
Turning from the window to Penny she shoved her nearly
finished apple under Penny's nose. "Wanna bite?"
"No thanks. I see the Dying Slave, down there."
"Well, andiamo!" Ula left the apple core on the window sill.
He looked more like an exhausted party boy than dying menial
labor, but Michelangelo must have had his reasons.
From the smooth, hard marble of the perfect toes, to the rough
parallel striations at the base sketched in by Michelangelo's chisel, up to
the satiny calves, Penny felt its life-like energy. Ula stood in front of the
statue as if at a holy shrine, and when Penny looked up at the hand
resting so gracefully on the chest, at the swelling curves of the neck, the
tilt of the head, the angle of the jaw, the lids softly shutting out the
world and - the lips, those lips, a shiver went through her.
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