Author’s note: This piece is a response to Labyrinthia Mythweaver’s recent noir prompt
“Lovers and madmen
Have such seething brains
Such shaping fantasies that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends…”
I was made mad when those words, set to a sultry melody, dropped like enticing fruit from her lips. With the magic of a siren’s call her warm mezzo permeated the expanse of the smoky piano bar, holding the assembled tycoons and bigwigs in an hypnotic thrall. The same feeling of rapture that had gripped me when, years prior as a fresh faced recruit of “Roosevelt’s Tree Army” with weekend pass in hand, my ear was caressed by those same heavenly verses.
For, indeed, it was her - the same raven hair, emerald eyes, sinuous figure, and air of beckoning mystery, filling the simple stage of that small town watering hole. Then - just as I saw her now, my eyes glued to the glass - she held the rough hewn crowd in her gloved hand, leaving them desperate for more. It had been, I thought at first, the whiskey hitting me, but as she launched into the final verses her eyes met mine, through the billowing smoke - and held, as if I was the only man present.
Before long my fancy was a flame with visions of romantic odysseys, with her - the Dame Divine - by my side. For she, surely, contained multitudes…
The fervent applause and lusty whistles of my fellow listeners signaled the end of the number, breaking my splendid reverie. Still, despite all the attention, her gaze remained fixed on me.
I rose, heading to the bar for another bracing round of liquid courage. For I was a green New England lad, driven far afield by the Depression, and a neophyte in the arts of Eros. By the time I returned, sufficiently fortified, a stouter soul had made his move - and won her intoxicating attention, soon disappearing arm in arm into the veil of night.
Time and my wandering feet brought some reprieve from that inaugural heartbreak. As I continued my earnest toil amongst the enlivening air of the Eastern forests, I came to know - and love - many a maid. And yet upon the consummation of each new dalliance, I would inevitably see her eyes, aglow with empyrean intensity, looking out from those of my would be paramours. No matter how great a fill of love I received, nothing could erase the tortured memory of what might have been…
Then the war came. I signed on with the Merchant Marine, serving on the Liberty ship Nathanael Greene out of Providence, Rhode Island. Riding the perilous lanes of the North Atlantic, crammed into convoys and scanning the icy waves for signs of pending death from the depths below, the light of those emerald eyes sustained me through the worst of the night watches. The thought of meeting my end in a watery grave, without having said so much as a word to this alluring angel, nigh consigned me to madness. Yet every escape from oblivion over the course of those four years was a balm of hope to my long suffering soul. As long as I lived and breathed there was always the chance our fates would align again - just as they had all those years before in a backwater saloon.
And, sure enough, they did, there in the weathered heart of the old city, in the grips of a slow but perceptible rot. I remained fixed by the window to the club, blind to all about me as I stood in awe of the fulfillment of my long standing wish. And, as if by telepathy, she turned her head my way. Our eyes met -
Nothing. She regarded me as a perfect stranger before turning back to her charmed onlookers, indulging them in an encore.
The dreariness of my environs hit me full force as I pulled away, making the pained retreat back to my dank shoebox of an apartment. Hanging up my rumpled coat and hat I poured my glass to the brim with bourbon. Slumping dejectedly into my armchair I cast a glance to my long neglected bookshelf, desperate for anything to stave off the self destructive despair gnawing at me -
I rose, intrigued by a volume I couldn’t recall having bought or otherwise acquired. It was a metaphysical tract of the “thoughts are things” variety, which I’d dabbled in during the war. As if prompted I opened the book, my eyes landing on the following passages regarding the power of imaginal “revision” to create one's desired outcome:
“Life is a romantic adventure. To live creatively, imagining novel solutions to ever more complex problems is far nobler than to restrain or kill out desire.
All that is desired can be imagined into existence.
“Wouldst thou be in a Dream, and yet not sleep?”
Try to revise your day every night before falling asleep. Try to visualize clearly and enter into the revised scene which would be the imaginal solution of your problem.”
I turned the page rather frantically:
“It is to the pruning shears of revision that we owe our prime fruit. Man and his past are one continuous structure. This structure contains all of the past which has been conserved and still operates below the threshold of his senses to influence the present and the future of his life.
The whole is carrying all of its contents with it; any alteration of content will result in an alteration in the present and the future.
The first act of correction or cure is always “Revise.”
If the past can be recreated into the present, so can the revised past.”
Lighting a cigarette to slow my racing mind, I pondered deeply over such a bold claim. If I had been willing to believe in an overarching Fate that would reunite me with my Dame Divine, how much of a leap was it to try this? Desperation is indeed a credulity amplifier.
Sufficiently relaxed by the bourbon and cigarette, I fully leaned back into my chair. Summoning all of my powers of recall I set myself, in the first person, back into that small watering hole, with the utmost sensory vividness. Yes - there, through the omnipresent haze of tobacco smoke, she was as I remembered her. Her gaze met mine as the song reached its end -
And, rather than absconding to the bar, I boldy rose and approached her, basking in her smile.
I enacted the scene over and over, getting lost in the rapture of how it was meant to be. Lost in the wonderful of it all, I fell into a blissful sleep…
“Darling?”
The warm tone stole over me, hastening my return to conscious awareness.
“There you are: I was worried you were going to turn into poor Rip Van Winkle.”
I rubbed my eyes, sitting up in a well appointed bed, sunlight streaming in through the opened drapes. The feel of the silk bedclothes and the radiant sunshine upon my face felt real - so deliciously real. As did the hand, bearing a diamond band, which entwined itself with mine: belonging to my Dame Divine, draped in a floral nightgown, dark hair hanging loose about her shoulders, and cigarette perched in her crimson lips.
“Perish the thought,” I replied with a laugh. “Especially when I have you to wake up to every morning.”
“Besides,” she said, running her hand on my stubbled jaw, “A beard is unbecoming of you.”
Planting a kiss on her cheek I stood and stretched - oh so naturally, as if the dank apartment and all that came with it was the spider webbed figment of a nightmare long past.
“Coffee ready?” I asked, making for the kitchen.
“Yes - but first,” she said, playfully pushing me back down on the bed, “A little something to mark the special occasion.”
I frowned. “Special occasion?”
She let out an affected sigh. “Of course, I have to remember everything: it was twenty five years ago today that a baby faced CCC kid was so bold enough as to approach me - his ‘Dame Divine.’”
“After you made eyes at him.”
She leaned in for a playful but passionate kiss before turning toward the grand piano on the opposite side of the room.
“And thank God he took the cue - he looked a little wet around the ears.”
She sat down like a queen on her throne, fingers ably sounding out the familiar tune as she sang:
“Lovers and madmen
Have such seething brains
Such shaping fantasies that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends…”
© Conor MacCormack, 2026. All rights reserved.
A pleasure to read you again, Conor. I keep circling the wake up. The silk, the ring, the twenty five years to the day, all of it a shade too clean. You leave it open whether he revised the world or just found a warmer place to be mad. The bourbon and the book are still on the table either way. That's the part I'd sit with. With my own bourbon. And my own book.
He wound up with his Dame Divine in the end. I enjoyed this little smoky, sultry journey, Conor. Keep ‘em coming.