I am afraid; I can no longer make the distinction between phantasm and reality. You stand at my screen door, faceless, like a mannequin. I paint your smile as the dogs bark, but I get your eyes all wrong. My hand is palsied by the memory of touch and I cannot hold my brush steady. Somebody says: 1978 was a very good year. It was the year of our summer, watching the world from our nest above the sea, our fathers drunk as wild Indians and our mothers...well, maybe they were drunk, too. The screen door is a membrane through which I cannot pass, and you are not you in the strictest sense, but a phenomenon, like ball lightning or will o' the wisp. I cannot touch you for fear of being burned, or worse, discovering that your light is insubstantial nothingness. I cannot help but think you were daring me to touch you all along, tomboy. Do you think of me when an old Roger Corman movie is on TV? Do you remember our winter under the blankets as it snowed outside? God, we were innocent then. Two lonely virgins in sublime repose. I thought of nothing but the smell of your hair and the way your opal eyes were open as you slept, your lips parted as you breathed softly on my shoulder. In the darkness of my doorway you dissolve away and I feel like I've been beaten with ax handles. I am naked and alone. I am a memory neither remembered nor forgotten. I am my own reflection in the iris of your eyes...

Ron Wilson lives in a small desert town with his wife, daughter, mother-in-law, and three dogs. His novelette "Shawnee's Smile" appears this year in Hoi Polloi II.