“We’re very far from our clothes!” I yelled. She seemed not to hear me, as the water grew shallow and below us we could see the fallen underwater tree trunks covered in moss and the green rocks of a river’s bay. When we reached the shore, Brigitte’s muscles were visibly pulsing. She crawled on all fours and shook her head like a beagle drying off. She flapped her candy pink tongue out and panted. She barked rich velvet barks; the sound hit the tree trunks and slammed back to my trembling purple earlobes. I stood soaking and ringing out my straggly hair with pruned hands. I put my palms to my ears to shield them from her woofing. Brigitte cupped her mouth and whistled. Out of the ancient fur trees bound packs of dogs. Great danes, daschunds, terriers, collies, pitbulls. Yowls and woofs. Whimpers and growls. Brigitte’s eyes rolled to the back of her skull with a wail. “My loves!” The dogs came to her, nibbling on Brigitte’s legs as she stroked them. They attached to her trunk like roots. A labrador’s mouth licked in between her toes and out burst a shimmering tambourine laugh. The dogs repulsed me.

“Why are we here? Let’s go back.” I shook like a jellyfish in freshwater. She paused, eying me somberly, tenderly shooing off the toe-licker.

“My dear, due to their unfortunate rabidity, the men on set want them exterminated. The men have been searching for the poor creatures. Murderous. I hid the dogs here, I care for them. What else would you have me do?” She sounded angry then. “This is what it is to be me! I am beautiful, and all around me men are killing dogs!” Brigitte turned to the mound of hairy drool and said gently, “I have to protect these bitches here.” She said the “I” like an “ee”, like beaches, and I pictured her on sunny sand, making love in the waves. The dogs snapped vampire teeth. Brigitte swayed among them in ecstasy.

“I have to go back,” I said softly.

Brigitte and the dogs took a breath in and fell silent. Her skin turned to ivory and their fur darkened into one damp mass. I edged back toward the water, covering my body with wrapped arms. “No.” Brigitte clutched the hair on the heads of the dogs on either side of her. “We will swim after you,” she said. She spoke slowly, like a python might.

“I cannot stay,” I said, as my toes inched in to the water, now slushy as snow.

“No?” Brigitte said, stepping forward toward me from her slathering tribe. Her beauty reeked.

“I have to go back to my boyfriend,” I pleaded.

“The pomegranate.”

“Yes.” My lower half immersed itself back in the river, I couldn’t feel my legs.

“He is sweet. Many seeded.”

“Yes.” Ice cubes tickled the bottoms of my feet. “And I like warm kisses,” I said regretfully, knowing it was the truth. “Warm as fire.” My hands held the soppy edge where the land dropped into the bank. My nipples were small cold stones pressed up against the dirt. Brigitte glided closer toward me. From my cowering position in the water below her, the petite doll was a giantess.

“Youth is something to touch for a little while,” she warned with a grim mouth losing its color. “We get old and our breasts turn to dust.” I nodded and submerged myself in the white river. Brigitte began to sob, low and gruff and horrid. She was a stringy rag being rung out. She dripped. Her cheeks were filled with bright blood and the tips of her breasts held slobber. Her face was loose. She had jowls now and they jiggled like jello on a pink plastic plate. Her eyes were dew drops on a leaf in early autumn. A poodle scurried out from the diseased pack. Brigitte picked her up like a mother would, though I knew she could never be a mother, and she wiped her face on its groomed bunched up coat tied in fur balls with red ribbons. “Dream of me,” she wept. Her willowy reflection painted itself on the river’s surface for a moment, and disappeared.

The day I met Brigitte Bardot, I had to leave her.