I fell in love with Phantasmagoria more than half a century ago and took her home with me; bathed, dressed, and adopted her for eternity, a cosmic breath.
My dream baby does not exist and yet she is real. Her name is Phantasmagoria.
She is the flow of turquoise at sunrise in the spring on the cool lake in Chimera.
I found her in an ancient book of secrets in the Library of Infinity. Was she inside the magical dictionary with no beginning or end?
Sweet Phantasmagoria tastes like hot apple pie with whipped cream on a sultry summer day. A zephyr brushes against my olive face.
Perhaps, I found her in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, unborn and hidden in a corner of esoteric words, invisible to others, only revealing her naked quintessence to me.
I gave birth to her in the late morning of my existence. Since then, she has resurrected me at night when I dream of peacocks and butterflies and my sweet Phantasmagoria.
Dr. Mel Waldman is a psychologist, poet, writer, and artist, whose stories have appeared in dozens of magazines, including Hardboiled Detective, Hardboiled, Detective Story Magazine, Espionage, the Saint, Pulp Metal Magazine, Pulpsmith, Inner Sins, Sweet Annie & Sweet Pea Review, Brooklyn Literary Review, and Audience. His poems have been widely published in magazines including Skive Magazine, Poetry Pacific, Poetica, the Jewish Press, the Jerusalem Post, Hot Metal Press, Mad Swirl, Haggard & Halloo, and Ascent Aspirations; and in Namaste Fiji: The International Anthology of Poetry. A past winner of the literary Gradiva Award in Psychoanalysis, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in literature and is the author of eleven books. I Am a Jew, his most recent, published by World Audience Publishers, is a collection of essays, memoir, short stories, poems, and plays, exploring his Jewish identity. Four mystery, fantasy, and horror stories will appear later this year in Postscripts, a British magazine. He recently completed an experimental mystery novel inspired by one of Freud’s case studies. (A dreamer, he has been inspired for decades by his patients and their heroic stories of trauma and survival. His life has been enriched by his work in inner city areas. His literary fantasy is to move and touch the souls of millions of people with his writings. As a therapist, he is aware that changing even one life can affect the spiritual flow of the universe.) Dr. Waldman's novel, Who Killed The Heartbreak Kid?, is available online through Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and its publisher, iUniverse.
