Through a friend at work, at our dreary little job in the bondmen’s trading house, who that day, somehow had a bit of money, notably so, as this was Depression Paris, I came to commit a sin that had no name to tell the priest after.

Through my friend,  I was invited to a country club one afternoon where I met a girl who floored me with her feet.

That night, she wore a wonderful, magical, yet, at first seedy, little dress that kept changing before my eyes, to a dance I attended with her, and although she did not seem to be the same girl from the afternoon, that seemed to fit the theme of the place, a theme of magical, mysterious,  beauty of all sorts, so her being perhaps another girl, mean’t nothing as she was so gorgeous, soft and delightful.

After the dance, she sent me to the moon, a place I’d never been and only thought existed in books and poems.

Somehow, as by legerdemain, all the girls at the dance were beautiful, in many different ways, yet of course you and I know most girls are not beautiful nor are most girl’s dresses.

Now, in the dawn’s hazy half-light, we stand, nervous, strangers, shuffling, our eyes not meeting, headed on our separate ways, half remembering, what the priests will later come calling, our grave mortal sin, that will of course for both of us need confessing, later, but for now, forgetting, at least for me, the name of the girl in the frenzied theater of our long night’s sin, wildly tumbling, I instead racing, back to the familiar, dreary bondsmen’s house, myself losing, for a another day busily counting, money to other men ever, belonging.

But, then, this was Paris, in the 1930’s, before the war, before the horror, when all sorts of things seemed possible, even a sin with no name, and yet, even then, after the afterglow, there simply was not very much to say.

There never is:

Very much to say.

After the afterglow.

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