"The Farmer's Boy and the Southern Princess"

Excerpt:

The boy watched the man go and then climbed back onto his rock, watching the sky and the plains around him, but haunted by those deep yellow eyes, and feeling more and more like he had been enlisted in something wicked.

Time passed and evening turned into early morning, and still the boy watched, oddly compelled, though on any other night he would have crept home to the warmth of the stable straw and the animals.

And as he watched, a blue star on the horizon glowed brighter for a moment and seemed to step out of the sky onto the distant horizon. It was the star they called the Southern Princess, or sometimes the Blue Lady. The boy blinked and rubbed his eyes at the impossibility of it, but the star came; across the plains it came, cutting wide curves of light through the grass, leaving a trail of faint glowing blue like phosphorescence on the sea. The boy watched it for an hour or more, though it seemed like moments. Beautiful things will do that to you. Beautiful things make time slick, so you can never hold onto the moment long enough. And before he knew it, she was there.

© 2006 C. Mitchell O'Neal

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