My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

FRANCESCA LIA BLOCK. Psyche’s Dark Night

PSYCHE MET CUPID ONLINE. THEY HAD ALREADY BEEN THROUGH A lot of failed relationships at this point so they were both wary. Psyche’s last relationship was with a guy who said he was divorced but turned out to be separated from his wife, whom he was still in love with. When Psyche had told this man she loved him, before she knew about the wife, he had said, “I love you, too. I love everybody. We are all one.” Cupid’s last relationship involved a narcissistic, domineering actress who broke up with him suddenly while he was out of town visiting his narcissistic, domineering mother. “You’re too subservient,” she’d said, although she hadn’t seemed to mind when he behaved that way around her. But in spite of these experiences, Cupid and Psyche were also both very attracted to each other’s profile so they got over their fears and talked on the phone a few times. They got along so well on the phone that Psyche kept expecting Cupid to ask her to coffee or tea, which was customary after a few good phone calls, but he never did. One night she drunk-dialed him after a party she had been to where none of the men interested her in any way or ignored her entirely and she and Cupid stayed on the phone laughing and flirting for hours. Finally, Psyche invited Cupid over. It was two in the morning and he came.

Psyche told Cupid to come in through her back door — it would be unlocked. Psyche lived in a cottage apartment near the beach. She could smell the sea from her bedroom and there was a small courtyard garden with a jacaranda tree that tossed purple flowers into a small pond surrounded by a ring of mossy stones. Psyche liked to imagine that fairies lived in that garden.

She held her breath as she heard the back door open. Why was she doing this? she wondered, suddenly feeling a tender nostalgia for her cute fairy apartment that was in walking distance from the beach. Cupid could have been a serial killer and he could kill her and she would be dead and never be able to live in her adorable rent-controlled apartment again. But his voice had sounded so warm and natural; she was sure he wasn’t a serial killer. What if he just wasn’t cute? In his pictures he looked gorgeous but he could have used fake pictures.

Cupid was wondering these same things about Psyche. Were her pictures old? Had she gained a large amount of weight since they were taken? Were they her pictures at all? Was she an alcoholic (Cupid was sober)? Was she a psycho-girl who would decide she was in love with him right away and stalk him when he rejected her? These were the reasons why you were always supposed to meet in a public place first.

But neither Cupid nor Psyche had had sex in a long time and there was so much chemistry on the phone that they gave in to their loneliness and desire. It was dark in Psyche’s room but as soon as their lips met and they felt each other’s bodies, smelled each other, fell to the bed, they knew they had not made a mistake about their attraction. (He’s not a serial killer! She’s not psycho!) Cupid felt huge and strong in Psyche’s arms and Psyche felt lithe and soft and her long, light brown curls wrapped around him and tickled his lips.

The attraction was so strong that Cupid came to Psyche’s bed every Saturday night for a month and they made love ecstatically and then held each other and talked. Psyche was a kindergarten teacher who had had one unsuccessful relationship after another for the past eight years. Both her parents were dead. Her best friend had recently gotten married and was pregnant so they rarely saw each other anymore. Psyche liked to read poetry and do yoga in her spare time. Cupid was an aspiring actor who had given up his dream and now worked a delivery job. He had a tumultuous relationship with his mother and hadn’t seen his dad since he was a little boy. Cupid attended weekly AA meetings where he was currently the meeting secretary. Like Psyche he did yoga and he liked to read books on spirituality. Cupid and Psyche had similar taste in music and movies. They had both listed Led Zeppelin IV and Wings of Desire as two of their favorite classics, respectively. They both loved dogs but couldn’t own one where they lived.

These were the facts — the things they had learned from reading each other’s profiles and talking on the phone. There were other things they could not have learned, like how Cupid snorted in a soft, charming way when he laughed and how Psyche giggled like a little girl so that their laughter formed a perfect song; how Cupid’s body temperature always ran a little high and Psyche’s a little low so that they balanced each other out in exactly the right way; how they both knew how to kiss fiercely but tenderly and knew how to adjust their force or gentleness to work with what the other was doing; how the chemicals that each of their bodies produced blended together to make some kind of perfume that, especially mixed with the smell of the sea and the garden, would have taken a master chemist years to create. They could not have known that the other would know exactly what to say at exactly the right time, like how Psyche told Cupid gently that she thought he was probably a wonderful actor — she could tell by his comic timing, magnetic personality, and beautiful voice, and how Cupid told Psyche, as he was coming, that she had a beautiful, beautiful soul.

The sex was great. The pillow talk was great. But it only happened at night.

Psyche wanted more. After she and Cupid made love she wanted to have him sleep over and take her out for omelets. She wanted them to sit on her bed in the afternoon watching movies and eating pizza with mushrooms and caramelized onions or reading aloud to each other. Psyche wanted to do Cupid’s laundry with him. She wanted them to go to the farmers’ market together and buy baskets of strawberries. She wanted to give Cupid natural supplements for depression and fatigue. Someday she wanted to have a child with him, a baby girl named Joy. (Cupid had once wondered aloud to her, “If you know right away when you meet someone that you want a baby with them, is that because you are supposed to have babies with them or is it just hormones and projection?” She had been afraid to answer so she had shrugged in the dark and kissed him again.) Besides wanting to have his baby, Psyche wanted to buy Cupid shirts the color of his eyes, or at least the color she imagined his eyes were, because she could not see them — he always came in the dark, made love to her, and left before it was light.

In fact, she did buy him a shirt at a thrift store, a size large cream-colored French cotton shirt covered with blue irises (she hadn’t been shopping for him; she’d been trying to find a vintage dress with roses on it but the shirt had caught her eye), but she knew she could not give it to him yet because it would scare him away even more (although less than the knowledge that she had already picked out the name of their unborn daughter), and so she put it in the back of her closet to save it for the day when he was no longer afraid. She imagined giving it to him then with a casual smile: “Oh, yeah, I just found this today. Hopefully it fits.” (It would in fact fit; she had measured the breadth of his shoulders with her hands while they were making love).

Psyche was right; Cupid would not want the shirt even though it did in fact match his eyes and fit his shoulders. The shirt would have felt like a symbol of some kind of commitment and he was afraid of commitment; he knew he even had trouble committing to himself. His day job was draining him. Cupid was a gifted actor — he had been in a theater group in college and had gotten the attention of a number of agents — but he was afraid that if he fully devoted himself to his art he might fail. He had gone out for auditions after he graduated but he hadn’t had any luck. He began to drink more heavily. Finally his agent fired him. Now he was sober but he didn’t even do theater anymore; he told people he didn’t have time for it, he was too drained from his job. He was fond of Psyche and loved being with her but she scared him a little. She sent him such passionate poems by her favorite poets like Pablo Neruda and Sappho, and she didn’t even know him yet! It seemed as if she wanted to drag him into the daylight, dress him up like a doll and take him out with her to show him off to the world. He came to her in the dark for a reason. The reason was not, as she suspected, that he was ashamed of being seen with her in the world (after all the bad relationships Psyche was feeling a little insecure about her appearance) or that he didn’t want to look at her in the sunlight or that he didn’t care about her as a person, but only as someone to fuck. No, he knew that in the dark he could hold onto himself. Cupid did not want to lose himself in anyone. He knew what it was like to go on a date with someone, then see her the next night and the next. By the fourth or fifth time he knew what it was like to feel as if he were completely invisible. That was why he came to Psyche only at night. He would not get lost in her. He was already invisible in the darkness so he could not disappear. For this reason he insisted that Psyche never see him in the light.

Psyche was in therapy and knew that she was projecting a lot onto Cupid. The fact that he came to her only at night allowed her to project onto him even more. She felt blind with Cupid and panicky, the way she had felt when she was a child playing hide-and-seek and she was the blindfolded one. “It.”

One night Cupid fell asleep after they had made love. Psyche was hoping that he would sleep through until morning so that she could see his face in the light and they could go out to breakfast. She lay awake for a long time watching the clock and waiting for the sun to rise. The room felt hot and stuffy. Finally Psyche could not wait anymore. She got up, lit a candle, and watched Cupid as he lay sleeping beside her. She saw that he was not a beast as she had sometimes suspected when she felt the fur on his chest and the prick of his horn (not that she would have cared if he were a beast; she would still have wanted to buy him groceries and supplements — maybe even more supplements! — and go out to breakfast with him) but a tall beautiful man with eyes like blue irises, as she had also suspected. He did look exactly like his online pictures. He took her breath away and tears came to her eyes suddenly like a pang in your chest. But then some candle wax fell on Cupid’s chest, above his heart. He woke and saw Psyche watching him. There was so much love and need in her eyes and it scared him. He wanted to run away.

“You don’t love me as much as I love you,” Psyche cried when she saw the fear lit in his eyes. “I’ve been in relationships like this before. I can’t do this again.”

This made Cupid more afraid and he said, “I don’t know how I feel about you. I am fond of you and I love being with you but that’s all I know. I haven’t seen anyone else.”

“You’ve been seeing someone else?” Psyche shouted, all her senses distorted now with fear.

This made Cupid angry. He spoke slowly. “No. Psyche. I haven’t seen anyone else.” Then he added, coolly, “But I might have tea with somebody if it came up.”

“Tea?” Psyche shouted. “What does tea with somebody mean? Is tea a euphemism for fucking? I can’t do this.” Psyche said I can’t do this too often. She said it whenever she got scared in a relationship and then she regretted it because the man she said it to heard her and decided, in that moment, he couldn’t do “this,” either.

“I can’t talk anymore,” Cupid said.

“Wait,” said Psyche, softening as the adrenaline drained from her body, as she realized how far she had gone, like the other times with the other men, and that it was probably too late. “I just want to tell you that I think you are wonderful and I don’t want us to hurt each other anymore. No one is right or wrong. We just want different things.”

Cupid, also softening with resignation and with compassion for Psyche, replied, “You are beautiful and wonderful and I don’t want this to get fucked up. It’s no one’s fault. We just want different things.”

Then he blew out the candle, went out the back door, and left her shaking with regret in the darkness.

The darkness was not safety for Psyche. If she disappeared in it she felt she might never return.

But there were so many tasks to do there. It was where she had to be.

Psyche worked hard in the figurative darkness. She taught her kindergartners, marketed, did the laundry, cleaned her apartment, did yoga until she was soaked through with sweat, meditated in her fairy garden, ran on the beach, worked out with weights, paid all the bills. She also tried to keep up her appearance. She got haircuts, facials, manicures, pedicures, and went shopping for cheap cute clothes at thrift stores (she scrupulously avoided the men’s section) so that she would not feel as if she had completely vanished into the dark. Even though her life looked light and bright and happy, and she was happy with her children at school and by herself in her sunny little apartment on weekends — the walls covered with the construction paper, tissue, crayon, and glitter art the kids had made for her — she felt so dark and empty when the sun went down, as if someone had stolen her organs and run off with them and she was left hollow as a scooped-out gourd, rotting in the night. She felt like an old pumpkin that you could smash with your fist, that would crumple in on itself if you even touched it. After Psyche got in bed and read a few chapters of a novel, she cried herself to sleep in the dark. She was always surprised, in the morning, when she was still there.

On Monday afternoons, Psyche saw her therapist Sophia. Luckily, Psyche had a really great therapist who kept the rates low so Psyche could see her every week. (If your name is Psyche you really better have a fucking great therapist like this one.) Sophia had been away for a month in Italy when Psyche confronted Cupid. If her therapist had not been away, Psyche would probably not have lit the candle at all. She would not have attacked Cupid and they would still be making love in the dark. Psyche had a history of breaking up with men while her therapists were away. None of the other therapists had been as good, though. One of them had been an actual psycho and called Psyche a bitch when she told the therapist things weren’t working out and that she wanted to move on. One of them got a rare disease and died soon after the vacation during which Psyche had broken up with her boyfriend at the time. Psyche did not have a good pattern around therapists on vacation and boyfriends. But Sophia, she was very wise. When she got back from her vacation in Italy, Sophia told Psyche a few very important things:

“Why don’t you call him?” Sophia asked Psyche.

“He doesn’t like phone calls,” Psyche said. “He acts weird on the phone if I call. He likes to be the one in control of the timing of things. Maybe I can send him an e-mail explaining that he made me think he really liked me and so I got carried away and started to like him and then I got scared because he wouldn’t let me see him in the light and I was just curious and so I lit the candle and then I saw how scared he looked and I was more scared because he is so beautiful so I attacked him and then he told me he wanted to have tea with other women which scared me because he had never mentioned anything like that before and I didn’t want to attack him anymore, any worse, so I just pushed him away and ended it for good.”

”Don’t be the lawyer,” Sophia said.

“Oh,” said Psyche. “You’re right. He wouldn’t like the lawyer.”

“Just send him a single line asking if he would be willing to talk to you.” And Sophia added, “In person. In the daytime. So you can really see what’s what.”

Sophia smiled. Sophia was so beautiful, Psyche thought. She had hair that softly framed her gentle face. She wore soft colors and a mix of beautiful jade and metals and saltwater pearls. Her office had a large stone Quan Yin statue, which watched Psyche lovingly from the corner, and a midnight-blue rug with pink peonies. Sophia was a painter before she became a therapist and had raised three children on her own. She never spoke about herself, unlike all the other therapists Psyche had had who always talked about themselves. Sophia was smarter and kinder than all of them combined. She had better boundaries and more love.

Psyche trusted Sophia and sent Cupid a one line e-mail asking if he would be willing to talk with her. In person. During the day.

Cupid had felt pressured by Psyche and then wounded when she suddenly rejected him. It had all happened so fast. One moment they were making love, then he was asleep in her arms, then he was awake and she was telling him he didn’t love her enough. and then, that she didn’t want to see him anymore. After Cupid left Psyche’s bedroom he had become mildly depressed. Although he had had a series of unsatisfactory romantic relationships, he usually had a positive effect on people. He had been elected secretary of his AA meeting three times and everyone seemed to perk up when he walked into the room. He was always introducing people to each other and some of the people he had introduced had fallen in love and two couples had gotten married. Cupid was proud of this and liked to consider himself a pretty good guy who generally made people happy. So it disturbed him that he had hurt Psyche, that she had been harsh with him because of it, and he began to withdraw. His term as secretary ended and he didn’t take on any new duties. He still went to meetings but he kept to himself. Women flirted with him — they always flirted with him — and he had gone to tea with a few of them. While he drank the tea he thought of Psyche, who he had never had tea with in the light, and then of all the other failed relationships in his life, and he became more depressed. His heart felt heavy and sore.

He wrote back to Psyche and said maybe, maybe he would meet her. Psyche waited a week and didn’t hear from him. At last he wrote to her and asked what she wanted to talk with him about. Psyche said she wanted to apologize for being overreactive and she wanted to see his face.

Cupid was still hurt. He wrote, “I’ve moved on. But I’ll think about it.”

Psyche pretended she was not devastated by this response and kept doing her tasks. She forced herself to get up every morning, wash her hair, get dressed in something halfway cute, make breakfast, pack her lunch, go to work, go to the gym, go to the grocery store, eat dinner, do the dishes, get in bed with a book, and not give in to the black hole that wanted to swallow her up. She fell into it a little though, every time she checked her computer for a message from Cupid that didn’t come.

He has moved on, she thought. But I can’t.

But then Cupid e-mailed her. When she saw his name in her inbox — she had gotten out of bed in the middle of the night to check, and as it turned out he had just sent the e-mail five minutes before — her heart was pounding so hard she thought she might faint. The e-mail said, “I’m not ready to meet with you at this time.”

Psyche could no longer pretend not to be devastated. She told Sophia what had happened with Cupid.

“I think we just need to dig in here,” Sophia said. “And look at you, your past, your unconscious. Everything else will work itself out from there.”

Psyche usually avoided talking about her childhood, her relationship with her parents, her fears. She spent most of her therapy time talking about the men she was dating. Sophia told her she thought she was distracting herself from the truth. So Psyche started keeping a journal of her dreams and bringing in childhood photos as Sophia had suggested so she could put the focus back on herself. She spent the next few months crying in Sophia’s office, teaching her kids, and walking around in a daze most of the rest of the time. She let her online dating subscription expire so that she wouldn’t compulsively check the site over and over, sometimes accidentally coming upon Cupid’s smiling picture. She felt like she was sorting endless tiny seeds of grain or stealing something precious from a vicious creature or going down into the underworld again and again.

Even on bright days it felt like the middle of night when you lie awake in despair waiting for morning. Once Psyche had believed in love. She had believed, as a little girl, that you meet your twin flame quite easily, that you are naturally drawn to each other across time and space, and that you know right away and as soon as you meet you embark on a journey together until you die. If problems arise you work through them together. Even if the days are long and hard you have the comfort of knowing that the other person will be there beside you in the quiet and peace of the night to soothe you with their body and their voice as you are there to soothe them. She had learned this by watching her parents, who had such a relationship. But when Psyche’s father had died, her mother had been so broken-hearted that she had died within a year. Psyche’s mother had said, “I don’t want to live without him,” and Psyche had begged her to stay, but she had died anyway because nothing was more important than the pain of living without her husband, not even her daughter. From that time on, Psyche was dubious about true love because she knew that even if you find it, it will one day come to an end, leaving you devastated. Perhaps that is why she picked such inappropriate men over and over again, even though they did not necessarily appear that way on the surface. They were men who were easy to project a lot of fantasies onto. They were usually quiet men who didn’t express their feelings a lot and who had experienced childhoods where it was necessary to adapt to dysfunctional situations by staying under the radar. More than one was an alcoholic. More than one was an actor. Psyche was a pretty, nice, well-educated young woman with a job she liked and a cute beach apartment. People who met her were surprised that she was still alone. But Psyche was beginning to understand.

One day at school one of her kinders was crying. Psyche knelt beside her and asked her why. The little girl said, “It’s my birthday tomorrow and no one is going to come.”

“How do you know?” Psyche asked. “Because I am going to come.”

“I just do,” said the little girl. “No one will come.” And she began to cry again.

Psyche thought that the way she had pushed Cupid away was not unlike what the little girl was feeling. If you were sad about something that hadn’t happened yet you couldn’t be disappointed.

After a particularly disappointing tea with an online woman who looked nothing like her profile picture and had no real interest in the things she had mentioned in her profile (yoga, reading, foreign films, spirituality — she was an atheist and a personal trainer, who knew only what downward dog was; she had never heard of Wim Wenders or Eckhart Tolle), Cupid began to focus on his true work instead of on relationships. He remembered how Psyche had encouraged him to find an acting class during their late-night talks, and one day he did. He played Oberon from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in one scene. His Oberon was charming and savage. When he was acting Cupid felt alive. His skin glowed, his eyes sparkled, and his stomach stopped churning. People began to flourish in his presence again. When Cupid made the students in his class laugh or cry, during a scene or an exercise, he felt like he was flying.

Nine months had passed since Psyche had seen Cupid. One day Psyche woke up from a dream of being kissed by an invisible man and sat down at her computer and e-mailed Cupid.

“Just thinking of you, hope you are well,” she typed.

Cupid wrote back almost immediately. “I’ve been thinking about you, too. Have you been dancing under the moonlight in your garden with the fairies? I felt it.”

“I would like to see you again sometime to talk,” Psyche wrote back the next day. She made herself wait twenty-four hours, just to be cool.

“What is your schedule like on weekend days?” Cupid wrote.

He figured that she had already seen him in the light and that now that they weren’t having sex it would be okay to hang out during daylight hours. He sensed that Psyche was the one lost in the darkness now and he wanted her to feel better so he chose to meet her at the Roman villa overlooking the sea.

Psyche drove up the road among the laurel and sycamore trees with the Pacific Ocean glittering mirthfully beneath her. It was a perfect day of blueness everywhere. She met Cupid in front of the villa and they hugged lightly and looked into each other’s eyes for a moment. Psyche told herself, Don’t fall into his eyes. You are a different person than he is. She understood, finally, why Cupid had wanted it to be dark when they were together.

Cupid thought how lovely Psyche looked in the daylight. With her long brown curls loose around her bare, pale shoulders and her cream-colored silk vintage dress with its red watercolor roses, she looked as beautiful as her soul had felt in his arms. He wondered why he had never gone out with her in the day before.

Psyche thought that Cupid looked tired but peaceful except for the deep crease between his eyebrows. She wanted to smooth it with her finger.

They walked up the wide steps and wandered through an herb garden, under a grape arbor, past a fountain with theatrical masks spouting water, and along a walkway with walls painted with trompe l’oeil architecture in pale, clear colors. They walked around a long reflecting pool where black bronze statues with eerie, pale, painted-on eyes lined the pool among the hedges and fruit trees.

The inlaid marble floors of the villa echoed with their footsteps. Black figures — nymphs and Satyrs with erections — caroused on terracotta urns. Unself-consciously nude marble gods and goddesses observed Cupid and Psyche coolly from pedestals.

There was a giant statue of Venus; Psyche stood below her. With her flawless marble skin and curves, Venus intimidated Psyche. As Psyche gazed up into Venus’s blank eyes, she had to keep tears from filling her own. Haven’t I done enough yet? she wondered. How long will it take?

Cupid looked up at Venus, winked and thought, pleasantly, Bitch.

Cupid and Psyche went to the museum café and sat and drank tea and shared a piece of carrot cake with a tiny orange carrot drawn on it in cream cheese frosting, and talked about what they had been doing. Psyche told Cupid about some of her tasks. She spoke breezily and laughed a lot, even though thinking of her life suddenly made her feel weary and close to tears again. (She had no real friends anymore, her job was low-paid and tiring, she had been through a series of bad relationships, therapy was hard.) Cupid told Psyche he had cut back the hours of his day job so he could take acting lessons again. He was auditioning for student films. He tried to sound positive for Psyche’s sake and his own, but he was filled with self-doubt. (What if he couldn’t even get a part in a student film?)

Psyche felt so happy for him when he said that he had returned to acting that she wanted to hug him again but she refrained.

Instead, as a way to convey warmth and affection, she said, “When I was leaving my apartment my neighbor was walking her dog, Pegasus. He wanted me to scratch his belly but I was running late so I told him, ‘Pegasus, I’m sorry but I can’t scratch you. I might have to get used to seeing big, beautiful boys and walking away from them.’”

Cupid smiled and blushed. Psyche was surprised that he blushed; she’d never seen him in the light before, remember. She hoped the story had conveyed what she meant it to — that he was a big, beautiful boy and that she might have to let him go but not that she wanted to let him go. She thought the blush indicated the story had been understood.

Since they were on the subject of dogs, Psyche told Cupid about a party one of her students had invited her to where the parents brought in a bunch of puppies to play with the children. (It was, significantly, the party that the little girl had been crying to Psyche about and everyone had come and had a great time.) Psyche had held a small dachshund named Wendy on her lap and it had immediately fallen asleep there. It had long eyelashes and delicate, feminine features. Psyche was in love and wished she could have kept it.

Cupid, who had spent his childhood feeling closer to his dogs than to his parents, told Psyche that he wished he could hire the puppy people to come to him so that he could just spend the afternoon petting puppies.

“Want to join me?” Cupid asked.

Psyche restrained herself from reaching out and touching his hand.

Cupid asked kindly, “What did you want to talk to me about?” and so Psyche began.

She apologized for overreacting when they had been together last. She said, “When you said you wanted to have tea with other women I heard you say you wanted to find someone prettier, someone you would be proud to be seen with in the day. But you didn’t say that and it was my own fear that made me shut you off like that.”

Cupid said, “Before I said that I felt like you were trying to get me to define my feelings for you and, for whatever reason that I should probably take a look at, when people do that to me I have trouble with it. But it’s not about finding someone prettier or someone I’m proud to be seen with.”

“I was pressuring you,” Psyche said. “I got scared. I’m sorry.”

“Part of relationships is communicating like this, talking about shadows in the light,” Cupid said. “Not that I know that much about it but that’s what I’ve heard.” Since he had stopped seeing Psyche he had sought out advice from the few happily married couples he knew and this is one thing he had learned from them.

“When I’m with you I lose myself,” Psyche said. “It’s like I’m watching the Cupid show.” (Here Cupid couldn’t help but smile; he was, after all, a performer.) “I forgot I’m there. I think that’s part of what happened.”

“I understand,” said Cupid. “I want to be with the person all the time and then after a certain amount of time I start feeling really bad and I have to go find myself again.”

They talked for a while more and then Psyche had to go to the yoga class she had promised she would make herself attend that afternoon — she would rather have stayed with Cupid. Cupid walked her down the steps and into the parking lot to her car and kissed her on the lips. She kissed his neck with a succession of rapid kisses. She had done this at night, in the dark, while he came, praising the beauty of her soul, but never in the light.

“Just in case,” she said. Which meant both just in case I never see you again I want to remember what it feels like to kiss your neck and just in case we are going to be together again I am going to kiss your neck as a promise of things to come.

Cupid did not say anything to let her know what he thought would happen because he really did not know, but he squeezed Psyche’s small body in the watercolor rose dress to his broad chest and when he looked at her for the last time his eyes were gentle as blue irises and Psyche, even in her fear, thought she would probably see them again. Maybe she would even be able to give him his shirt. She had come to think of the man’s shirt hanging in the back of her closet as his. But, of course, she wasn’t sure if she would ever see him or give him the shirt.

Cupid walked away whistling to himself. He felt lighter, almost buoyant. He didn’t mind this kind of uncertainty; in fact it comforted him. He would like this state of noncommitment, warmth, and hope to go on forever.

Psyche, on the other hand, wanted clarity and reassurance and plans for a second date, but for now she did not turn her head and longingly watch Cupid walk away. Instead, she checked her own eyes in the car mirror.

They looked big and bright. They belonged to her and they could see.