Leven-thirty Saturday Night

She greeted me with wide blue eyes and opened red lips. I figured her out as easily as two plus two. She sat at the bar on a backless stool wearing a backless black dress, her head turned towards me while her body leaned into the bar, a half-empty whisky glass in one hand, a nearly spent cigarette in the other, and her dark hair haloed by gray smoke.

Will-o’-the-Wisp

She was all smoke. A wisp of the woman she once was. She gazed through gin-blurred eyes at the image that stared back at her from the bar's mirror--an anamorphic fun-house mirror shadow of the woman she once was, the woman she could have still been.