neon epiphany

As I walk back through the park in the twilight mist, I pass a young woman. She is familiar but strange, an image from a funhouse mirror, features etched in a lost language. Her hair falls in ebony cascades, and she wears the sea on her back and dancing fire around her legs. She glances at me and gives the faintest of smiles, but I continue on through the dimming haze, and soon she is beyond the edge of my vision.

I cannot afford hope.

She passes out of my life, again -- as she always has.

In my hand, a jeweled bracelet, black and deep as night -- fair exchange for another shard of my soul.

Someday, I may turn and ask her true name, and the puzzle will be unlocked. But not for me, not yet, not yet.