The Bread We Eat in Dreams

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She walks into my life legs first, a long drink of water in the desert of my thirties. Her shoes are red; her eyes are green. She’s an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. She mixes my metaphors like a martini and serves up my heart tartare. They all do. Every time. They have to. It’s that kind of story.

The lady in question stands in the corner of my office, lighting the cigarette dictated by tradition with shaking hands.

“You gotta help me, mister,” she says.

I’m a miss, but that doesn’t matter. In situations like this, you have to stick to the formula. She’s the damsel in distress, I see that right away. I’m her knight in shining armor, even if that armor is a size eight slingback in Antique Pearl.

“Tell me all your troubles,” I say in my best baritone, and pour her a whiskey, straight. She drinks it, leaves a frosty red lip-print on the glass.

And she takes a deep breath that makes her black dress shift just so. She tells me a man is after her because he wants her heart. He chases her through the dark, through the neon forest of rainy streets. Or she has this brother, see, with a withered arm he carries in a sling, crooked like a bird’s wing. She was supposed to protect him from their father but she just wasn’t strong enough. Or her stepmother can’t stand the sight of her and beats her every night for a dozen sins she’s never thought of. Or she’s waited and waited for a child but nothing doing. Or she pricked her finger on a needle when she was sixteen and oh, glory, the things she’s done to keep on pricking. Or she woke up and all her savings accounts were gone, the money turned worthless overnight. Maybe it’s a simple one: the mirror said she wasn’t pretty anymore.

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