And who hasn’t been out barbecuing at ten or eleven at night, joint in hand, to be visited by a sylph. Just a whispering, no words, no spectral figures, just formless female sussurations all about. Laughter heard in the distance, real or imagined, perhaps both, perhaps an augmentation of a natural sound, a misrouting of a distant train’s mumblings, as it pushes through the night, dragging nothing but empty flatbeds. This signal, gated into some pre language area, given form, given shape, becoming a suggestion, a zaftig female body always in the periphery, in the mind’s eye. She becomes clearer as you look at the coals, gray at the edges, but hearts afire. Afterimages jitter around the coals, made of some negative color that could never be drawn, that was never picked up by any combination of rods and cones, that no substance could ever reflect…