Yet another obligatory forty-something’s anniversary trip to the Rockies amounted to an evening in a stale hotel. The umber tinge around the metal kitchen faucet did, indeed, complement the gilded thread of the baroque-patterned couch (a flea market masterpiece) and the free-roaming sparks of the fireplace. Beside me on the couch was the object of my antiquated matrimony, a charmingly fat crone with a bit of spittle running down her benumbed cheek. As she dozed, I left on the film noir of her choosing, sure that she would rise from her paralytic state of sleep had I taken the liberty to watch something else. So, there I sat, lulled to half-consciousness by warbled 1940’s voices and a winter gale against the shutters. And then the door wailed quietly, and I assumed it was the bellboy for whom we had left it ajar. It wasn’t.

A skittish girl with caramel hair leaked like a beam of light through the doorway and situated herself on the adjacent couch. Her pixie frame made less than a dent in the cushion as she sat, awkwardly rigid. I saw only the whites of her round eyes as she fixated on the television in feigned interest. I would’ve sworn she were an apparition, a ghostly waif with opalescent cheeks, had she not been ruddy-nosed with windburn. I was so burdened with the incongruity of her existence that I refrained from making a sound, only prolonging the situation.

She broke my confused agony with a turn of her neck. At the moment of clarity when our pupils locked, her throat emitted a breathy cry and her eyes were ablaze with bewilderment. She flinched to a hunched stance, our gazes still embracing, as she tripped over her white ankles as they ran brainlessly towards the door. She started with “I’m so-”, swallowed it with “This isn’t my-”, and drowned it once and for all with the gunshot bang of a door yanked shut.

I still contemplate this flash-flood of a moment, and since I was the only witness, I leave the artistry of details to myself. Sometimes, she’s the fifth Catholic daughter when she dances across the black bank of my memory, the little girl forgotten by a portly mother of six. She is the doctor’s girl causing mischief, the only child of a single mother, the forest fairy and the city’s favorite orphan. Her hair is cinnamon, sage, and electric blue. Sometimes I look at her on a canvas of closed eyes and can’t be convinced that I’m looking at anyone other than myself. She is bone white, milk white, translucent -- and then she’s gone. She’d run forever on frightened legs had she not opened the wrong door just once, seen my wife and me painted gray by the film noir, and left a drop of her color bleeding into the room.