BEAUTY PASSES LIKE A DREAM - He pops open his suitcase and every item sits unremarkably. Unfolding and refolding his trousers, he counts the minutes like coins, pressing each one between his fingers. Unbuttoning his jeans, he looks down and no great geography lies there. The beginning was beginning to make him wonder.

He would describe her as dressed like the devil, always coming apart. When drunk and morose about a love affair, she had a tendency to look for the nearest window. Ordinary events bothered her and so she took to wearing mismatched shoes.

Traffic mutters outside his window. He thinks he smells sugar and is reminded of the distant past. How long has it been since he pulled the pennies from her eyes? He dusted her off with a corner of his sleeve and she stretched out of sleep as if from some faraway place. He looked at her and she looked at him and the expression was the same. "Sight restored!" she said, smiling with frank defiance, and the expression did not change.

Pulling on a pair of black trousers and fitting into a tight hat, the distant past snaps shut. He walks right out of the Mercy Hotel and she's got his guitar in the trunk.

"Once we renovate the earth, we'll feel right at home!" she says, striking a match against her thigh. "We're leaving behind the bells and whistles for the open road, and when we git where we're going we won't be alone. So sing me something sweet, my angel, and tell it like it is, so when it plays on the radio I can say, 'That one's his!'"

And so it was in the front seat of the car that night. He sang about her brown boot on the fender, and all the snow coming from the moon. He sang of things forgotten on the plains of Manitoba, like his favorite T-shirt and his oldest friend. He sang into the following day, about all the drunken operations done on his broken heart by pretty girls, and all of the cigarettes he smoked in the summertime, and how he knew no evil star. He recalled bits of conversation held across an upright piano, and a phone booth by a gas station where a violin played to her lover. He confessed that the river made him, and in the lake lay his brother.

He promises to never leave her. She just smiles and pulls over. The sun spots him as he wanders from the car; she's smoking over a road map. Looking up she squints at what seems to be a town and says, "I can hear the voices on the green. Pop the trunk and grab yer axe. We'll walk from here." Leaving the car and the road behind them, they approach the fold. "They love you when yer a hero," she says, "and tonight that's what you'll be. 'Cuz life's too short to listen to shitty music, and beauty passes like a dream."

by Deborah Ann