Where the Sheep Herd.

My friend gave me this picture to write a story.

Warning: Not a happy one.

She said she’d never leave this town.

Even when things here got so sickeningly routine. Even when the neighbors gossiped about us disappearing every day. Even when they called her trouble.

No, she loved it here. Particularly out in the field. On that special tree.

She would sit against the trunk, with her flowery dress spread out around her like a Chinese fold-up fan. She’d tilt her head back and let the sun beat down on her face.

Then she’d open up her ruby lips and let out the most beautiful sounds I ever heard.

This routine was anything but sickening.

Saturdays we would stay out there for hours. She would sing and I would lay flat on my belly, picking little weeds out of the grass and letting them fly away in the wind.

She sometimes climbed the tree. The birds escaping the tree echoed the pounding of my heart as I begged her to come down.

Her songs sometimes made me cry. She had a way of making time stop.

I lost myself in her blue-green eyes. They reminded me of a fresh pond. Her pale face was like sand, her ruby lips like ripe apple skin.

I wouldn’t say we were in love. That takes two people intertwined in each other. Not just one quiet boy wrapped around her.

She was too big for me. Her dreams spread as wide as the expanding fields around us, her passion grew like the branches of that tree–always hoping to touch the sky.

Never having a chance.

The neighbors whisper now about how she killed me.

Nobody truly understood her. Maybe I never did either, but at least I loved her.

The day the singing stopped, the day she was a mischievous bird–singing from the top branch–was the last day I saw that tree.

I can never return to the tree. At least, only in my dreams. But in my dreams its not summer anymore. The sun has disappeared. Everything is white, naked, dead. Which I imagine is symbolic.

This is where the sheep herd.

This is where the sheep heard me scream.

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