Her Name: Bright as the Sun

When she would go to the edge of town, peeking up through the sea of tall, golden grass, he rode his strange metal horse, but instead of four legs, it rolled on two wheels. As he would pass, she would raise her head, just above the tassels of grass, so that the deep blackness of her eyes watched his feet, shoed in brown leather, peddle his bicycle down that dirt road with dust streaming from his back tire and into the air, trailing behind him like the unseen scent-cloud of a defensive skunk, and sending out a signal with her quiet laugh. Before he could turn his head, usually so fast that his funny-looking cap’s bill would spin to the left side of his pale but extraordinarily handsome (so she believed) face, she would submerge herself beneath the surface, leaving only slight movements of grass that could easily be described as the wind.

And so, twice a day, every day for more than a week, he traveled, on his bicycle, down the same stretch of road, trying to catch a glimpse of whom it was on the other end of that entrancing giggle. One thing he knew for sure was the sweet, soft laugh had to belong to a female, goddess of the planes. ‘Perhaps, she’s a fish who laughs and swims through oceans of sparse brown grass, awaiting to kiss me, alas, she will smile, alas,’ he wrote in his journal one day, while contemplating her existence and stopping to eat a sandwich, underneath a gigantic oak that shielded him from the harsh heat of that dry summer day.