“Hello, Umbra magazine. How may I help you?”

“Good morning. May I speak to one Sylvia Lucas, please?”

“One moment.”

“Sylvia Lucas speaking.”

“Hello, Sylvia, my name is Philip Llewellyn,” he said, remembering the script that he’d been given. “I’m over here from England for a bit and I’ve got a little parcel for you from a famous blues singer by the name of Muddy Waters. When do you suppose we could meet up so I can give it to you?”

There was silence on the line.

“Are you there?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s … awfully nice of him. Oh … I didn’t think that he remembered me. Oh, wow … I don’t know what to say. Aah … that’s a really nice of him thing to do. Oh, sorry, that didn’t make much sense, did it? I’m a little disoriented today. What’s your schedule like, Phil? How soon can we meet?”

“Well, I’ve got some auditions coming up, and, to tell the truth, I’m not terribly familiar with New York. It’s my first time. Maybe if I told you where I am staying, you could arrange to meet me sometime.”

“Okay, Phil, where are you?”

They made arrangements to meet that evening.

The sun was low across the tops of the trees in Prospect Park when Sylvia entered the lobby of the Fulton Inn with a bouquet of cut flowers, hoping that it had really been Fire who called—wishing, as her heart rolled around like a child demanding to be born, that Phil was simply a character that Fire had assumed to make this surprise even more special, and that he would step out from behind one of these columns and smile at her now. Any minute.

This would not happen though. She asked the concierge for Phil and was told that he was out.

“Did he leave a package for anyone?”

She was handed a small burlap sack containing a box wrapped in corrugated brown paper, topped with a sisal bow.

Flushed with curiosity and excitement, Sylvia kept peeking into the bag on the way home, happy not so much that he had sent her a gift, as that he had remembered her.

As soon as she got in, she sat on the bed and opened the box, finding inside a handmade book, twenty-four pages of heavy-gauge paper bound with needle and embroidery thread. Affixed to the cover was a dried rose. Inside was a series of warmly impressionistic streetscapes languorously rendered in ink and gouache—all unified by the presence of a woman in whose form she recognized a bit of herself.

There was a poem done in calligraphy on the inside back cover. Her middle turned to liquid when she read it. She had to lie down. Flopping backward into the pillows she imagined herself as a skydiver—freefalling through the clouds, too thrilled by the feeling of weightlessness to think about hitting the ground.

PERSON
“He.” I say “he” to construct the fiction of this thing. I can now call it love and riddle his passions with old clichés. He sees her in strange cities, her body poised in orange light, and he paints her onto canvases, constant orgasms, admissions that she haunts him always. “Him,” I say, not “me”—it is all fiction.