He dreamt that he met a woman at the corner bar, only he wasn’t sure what corner and it didn’t look like any bar he had ever been in before.  Its angles kept shifting and changing, as if it were a living thing.  Maybe it was.  After a while, she smiled and then slid off her chair and went toward the exit, looking back over her shoulder to make sure he was following her.  He was.  She had a slight catch to her step, almost a limp but not quite.  He followed her down a dark, damp street in a cold drizzle, then down a pale alley where, near the back, she started up a rickety set of wooden stairs.  He followed her.  Did we talk in the bar? he wondered.  He couldn’t remember.  Do I know anything about her?  He was on the stairs now and there she was, above him, on a creaking landing, forcing up a window sash.  She got the sash up and propped it in place with a wooden dowel which she reached out from somewhere inside, and then slipped in.
            He stayed on the landing, hesitating, unsure of what was expected of him.  He could see her within, the lesser dark of her skin rustling about the deeper dark of the room, and then she glided close to the window and beckoned to him, and then faded away again.
            He gathered his breath and clambered his way in.

            She stood there, just beside a closet door, which, as he approached, she tugged at until he heard a snap and it opened.
            It was too dark inside to see well.  There was something there but he couldn’t make out what it was—a heap of something, or a pile.
            And then there was a click and he saw her pale white arm to one side of him, her fingers still brushing the switchplate.  In the light the vague heap or pile became a mound of shoes, as tall as his breast-bone.  There was something strange about it, something wrong, but he couldn’t quite say what.
            He turned to look at her.  She stood in the bright slash of light cast out of the closet.  It was easy now to see that there was something wrong with one of her legs, that what he had assumed was flesh and bone was a prosthetic.  And when he turned away from her he realized what had disturbed him about the mound of shoes:  that all of them, all the shoes that he could see and surely all below that, curved the same way.  All belonged to the same foot.  But which foot was it? he wondered.   The foot that she had or the foot that she did not?
            But before he could turn around to ask her, the mound itself began to move, something he could never quite see rising slowly from it.  Terrified, he awoke.  There was just a moment when he could still feel the ghost of his missing arm, tingling.  And then that too was gone.