'New York Herald Tribune, New York Herald tribune'...

How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? Yesterday, I caught one.

On the pavement of Champs Élysées. She was calling out to an invisible buyer, ‘New York Herald Tribune! New York Herald Tribune!’ Her lilting voice floated about in the air a few feet around her and vaporized into the afternoon sun. Her petite figure walked the pavement of Champs-Élysées like a daydream , calling out to sell the stories of the new world to grumpy Parisians on a Monday morning. Violins played a certain melody tinged with ennui. It was an ennui of a beautifully fatal lady, in trim trousers and a sweater with New York Herald Tribune written on it.

I sneak into her tiny apartment, and watch her proliferate.Her nape is her fortune. Her face is a myth. She flits and jumps across the bed, over my shoulders, and under the sheets. Her gramophone plays symphonies that turn her into Cleopatra, and her nose glistens in the sunbeams filtering in though the shades. Renoir immortally froze her, before she could turn around in restless boredom and make up a frown. She dons the mafia of the enigmatic bohemian. Her cigarette smells American. Her striped shirt is the scent of crisp newspaper.

She takes my dreaming hat, and grasps a reverie in the midst of a radio commentary. She cant shut her eyes hard enough to make everything turn black. The red plays around like the flame of her heart behind her eyelids. I sit here and gaze. It is all I can do. She stares back with competition. Who blinks first? She couldn’t care less. She is too busy making her way through Dylan Thomas and William Faulkner. Her head is up there, in the clouds. Breathless. Now I see it, now I don’t. She is Napoleon , now pinning me down with her telescope. Now hiding from the world by simply turning away.

You tell me to make you smile. And smile even before I begin. You ask for a reason , and then don’t even care for it. You close your eyes, and I lose you in an instant. You turn around to look, and ask why I look at you.

‘Between grief and nothing’ , did you choose grief?

What did you choose? Patricia, What did you choose?

Newspaper seller . Daydreamer. New Yorker in Paris.

la femme fatale, what did you choose?