All Wickedness, All Desire

It was just after the waiter leaned in to clear the plates and before she'd had time to finish the dessert menu, stuck somewhere in time between the crème brûlée and the chocolate truffles, as the coffee purred its hillside aroma into the space that separated them. It was then that he had broken her heart and, at the same time, freed her and sent her directionless into the wind as she pushed out of her mind the static hum of an unknown future and his grocery list of complaints. The steward remembered her crying quietly and told me that she had simply folded her napkin and set it down between them and stood downcast while he had helped her into her coat. When I asked the maître d'hôtel how she had looked he said that she was beautiful and sad and that when he had asked her if she needed a cab she had responded with a shake of her head and , "Non, merci." The air outside was thick with humidity and as the temperature dropped a thin gauze settled over the street and the cart vendor at the corner told me that she had given him a sharp laugh as he wished her a good night. Into that night I followed her and when I reached the footbridge I had to turn away from the gentleman walking his ghostly gray dog, his long coat over his arm and the strange pillbox hat on his head, because he couldn't stop repeating, "Her skin was translucent and I cried out to her. Translucent. So beautiful." As the lights from the village faded behind me I turned to look for her in the spheres of mist along the canal but the shapes that loomed up at me were, simply, a bench and a fountain. The young girls, tall and lean, jogging beside the water had stopped as she passed and they told me that she laughed at nothing and uttered a sad soliloquy as she passed, the final words of which were, "Long and tireless night, do not deceive me but shelter me and in this barren womb, and despite all wickedness, we shall overcome all desire.", and then they heard no more.

I stood there, on the path, still and listening but heard no footsteps nor voices on the wind and I reconciled my fears with my fancy and settled instead on the smooth hiss of the dampened streets and the restless wind while somewhere in the city she cried and ran, oblivious that she had disappeared from sight and would never be found.