The Girl
A girl stands alone in the middle of the field, the wind messing with her hair and dress. her eyes are closed, and her body sways back and forth slightly with the movement of the grass.
The sky is cloudless and the sun shines brightly. A lone goat herder calls out to his dogs to round up the flock on the other side of the bowl. His call echoes in a whisper across the mountains, and her head turns slightly toward the sound. The noon sun slowly begins to dip in the sky as the afternoon progresses, stretching out the shadows.
The girl opens her eyes and begins to walk slowly down the gentle slope letting her hands run along the tops of the tall summer flowers.
A young man sits alone in the empty bar while the radio plays quietly in the background. His eyes are closed as he hums along with the song. Outside the town is empty; everyone is preparing for the summer festival. He can’t bring himself to do anything anymore, even though he knows he should be out helping. It’s impossible to shake the girl’s image from his mind, and seeing her in the field is all he can think about. That afternoon plays over and over in his mind.
“Come on. Come dance with me,” she calls out to him.
“But I like watching you here,” he replies.
Her musical laughter makes him smile as she twirls around. She beckons for him to join her, but he just stands there watching.
A vision from a dream, she looks like an angel. It was as though she had come down from heaven just to steal his heart.
Shaking his head he continues to stare blankly at the counter, absentmindedly tracing the grain of the wood. He’s stopped humming along to the radio.
Laying out the blanket he brought along, he sits down, opens the basket and begins unpacking it. One by one, he pulls out the sandwiches, the bag of grapes, the cups of chocolate pudding, and, finally, the plastic cups and bottle of sparkling grape juice.
She walks up behind him and peers over his shoulder.
“Oh, lunch! I’m starving.”
“I packed your favorites.”
“Mmm…pudding…” she says snatching one of the cups and tearing the lid off and licking it clean.
He laughs because she has gotten pudding on the tip of her nose.
“You’ve got some right here,” he says pointing to his own nose.
She tries to get it off with her tongue. He laughs again as reaches over to wipe it off with his finger.
“What did you go and do that for? I almost had it.”
He just smiles as he licks the pudding off his finger.
The door of the bar creeks, and he looks up startled. Hope flashes in his eyes, thinking that it might be her, but it’s only the town stray. Limping in, the dog looks up at him begging for some scraps. The boy slides off the barstool. The dog follows, his lame leg thudding on the wood floor.
In the kitchen, the boy searches the storeroom and finds a hard loaf of bread. Grabbing a chipped bowl off of the shelf, he fills it with water, places it on the ground, and lets the dog lap it up. Meanwhile, the boy struggles to break the loaf into smaller pieces.
The dog finishes the water and nudges the bowl closer to the boy’s feet. He bends down and drops the bread in.
As the boy sits down again at the counter, he lets out a long sigh. He is ashamed of himself for thinking that it might have been her walking through the door, he knows that it would never happen—he knows that’s not possible anymore.
A bag waits for her at the door. When she bends down to pick it up, a lock of hair comes loose from behind her ear and falls gracefully into her eyes. He moves to brush it out of the way for her, but she flicks her head back, moving it herself.
“Don’t worry about it,” she says quietly.
“Where are you going? Are you going to come back? Why are you leaving? Don’t I mean anything to you? Please give me some kind of answer,” he pleads.
“I-I just need to go.”
“But why? I love you, and I thought that you loved me, too.”
“I do, at least I think I do…really, honestly I don’t know,” she says with a shrug, exasperated. “I have to… I can’t stay here.”
“Are saying this town isn’t good enough for you? That I’m not good enough for you?” he replies sharply.
With a final question hanging in the air, she turns and leaves, slamming the door behind her.
All he would have of her now were these memories. For the rest of his life he would hang onto last summer’s memories.
He begins to cry, and the first few tears slide off the tip of his nose landing on the knot in the wood that he had been tracing.
Wiping away the tears with his sleeve, he takes the bowl back into the kitchen. It clatters into the sink to be washed later.
The door swings open again as the stray limps outside to wander the streets.
He walks over to the radio and turns it off; the silence is deafening. He goes over to the entrance, opens the door, and steps out. Coming back from the festival preparations, a few villagers make their way to the beer hall.
He steps further out into the street to see them coming from the direction of the fields. He turns away and begins to walk, quickening his pace as he nears the train station. Soon he’s running.
The boy takes one quick look back and sees the stray sitting in the middle of the street staring after him. The stray seems to be smiling; his head is tilted, giving the boy an expression that says, Well, go. Go and get the answers you need.
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