Harry Flowers: Public Bar
Once I was a young man. I can't recall what I did with all that youth, but I do remember that I had a young man's preoccupations. I imagine that's what first drew me to Shell.
She had a body like the constellation of Virgo, and was just as old and bright. I met her at the Town Hall Hotel, and it was there in the half-light of our evenings together that Shell told my own stories back to me.
Once, for example, she told me that I had been an architect, trying to square the circle. And then I was a painter, working on the bridge. Later, I was a writer living in a studio full of rotting manuscripts. She even told me about the time I was a cook in the Imperial kitchens; and then about the time when I was an immigrant watchmaker with a penchant for magic...but I don't think I believed her for a moment. No, not for a moment.
But then I'd rather her elaborate fictions, her tangled web of fabrications, than the grinding truth that stares us squarely in the face each and every day. Better the half-light of a single magic evening than the bright glare of a thousand faceless days.
That's what Shell taught me. And I raise my glass to her for that.
