Who doesn't want to believe in magic, even if we may at times resist the idea that genie or an amulet could grant us our desires. Perhaps there is a chance of change in even the most certain of things -- like an equation?

A half an hour, 45 minutes outside town, the hills begin to lift, and
if you know just where to look, you see the first blue line of
mountains reaching towards the sky. That's where he left the highway,
dipped and swooped through steepening hills, past trees that seemed to
grow taller, deeper green as we climbed. A gravel road following the

I watched deep blue lighten to gray, felt that extra stillness, extra
quiet of a weekend morning in a strictly-business downtown. Standing by
the hotel window, I stared down the long, straight, empty streets of
this place I didn't know, at all the hopes and happiness, despair and
desperation sheltering under the endless neat rows of roofs, beneath

It's not as simple as desire, not just a layer, or even two. It's art.

Perhaps it was when I lifted my foot, to untie my shoe, and pants rose
just enough to show the smallest band of smooth and newly-shaven skin,
that we decided on a painting, not a sketch. I saw my secret exposed. I
saw him look. I looked up at his face, tried a small smile.

By late afternoon, I was feeling pretty sure I'd called it right to
come up here. I phoned the boss, reported not quite as optimistically
as I felt and told myself that I was clocking out.

The evening rush home had started, horns and rumbling of motors as
downtown spilled its people out for another night. I went the way the
red lights let me; to the corner where he'd said his store was. I

You always worry, can they see? Is there something, maybe the way
you've let your hand relax or your wrist bend, despite all the times
you've caught yourself and clenched your fingers, straightened the
curve. Something -- the way you hold a hand to your mouth? Or tilt your
head? Why do you hook your knees together when you sit: ankle on

It was getting dark when I got there, and I'd managed to get off the
wrong exit, too, guessing downtown was where it wasn't, as I always do.
It meant an anxious tour through the dark and empty streets down by the
river, looking for a place to stay, finding nothing until I finally
passed an open space -- park or vacant lot, I couldn't tell and didn't

Sometimes, despite a breath of breeze across the inky river, the night air seemed almost liquid with the lingering heat ....

Halfway across the river, the ferry turns. The gulls, as always, surprised by the boat's movement now wheel and dive, complaining cries as they take up their stations once again. The turn means a breeze from a fresh direction can ruffle hair, feather the hem of the skirt that after all these months I dare to wear so that it dances round my knees.

I try to shape my days now by my work. Numbers in charts, words battered out of a keyboard, spit out from a whirring printer: Let's say it is work like that I do, work meant for grey-walled cubicles under flickering fluorescent lights.

Maybe what keeps us on our course is fearing how the shock of change will shake the people whom we know.

The fountain that my own fingers recall, nothing like this: Drawn from a pond, a puddle. But, oh, how I felt an ocean of you crashing in. Ocean: warm saltiness of life, thick with potential, humming with energy barely contained, condensed of beating hearts and fluttering gills and lashing tails of a million, of a billion tiny creatures saying: Live, live.

Maybe it's just a question of an inch or two

Yes: I see you nod.