Jeremy felt the sun warm his skin as he walked down the dusty lane. The entire day had a stillness to it: the sun in the sky, the embrace of warm, breezeless air, the green fields and tired, leaning trees over the gravel lane. Only Jeremy moved through it, creating life as he walked: puffs of dust floating into the air behind him, the sound of his lazy whistle, the spring of his homemade fishing pole on his shoulder. Turning off the lane, he followed a trickle of a creek that dripped out of a culvert and into a small jungle of green. Letting the bushes swish closed behind him, Jeremy stood by the pond. The low rumble of a semi on a distant highway whispered through the air, and then Jeremy was alone. He dipped his hook into the hair pond and let it sink away through the slow-swaying hairs until he couldn't see it. Leaning back, he closed his eyes and waited for a tug, if such a thing was to come.

With the stillness of the place, Jeremy didn't know if it had been minutes, or if he had fallen asleep and hours had passed, or maybe years, when something moved. It called his wandering mind back to himself, and he cracked an eye open. Ripples in the hair pond, motion in the trees, a spot of breeze all caught his attention.

She rose from the rippling hair, her back to Jeremy, as easily as climbing a stair. Jeremy watched, still as the tree he leaned against. Now she was the only moving thing in the world, wringing out her hair with the natural grace one only exhibits when free to be graceless.

Jeremy traced her curves with his eyes, the slope of the shoulder, the swell and sway of the breast and she twisted, the broadening of the waist and the place he didn't dare look. The heat he felt on his cheeks was not all from the sun, now. As she bent to pull on clothes that clung to her damp skin, Jeremy thought it impossible that his sisters could ever grow into such a person as this.

She walked into the wood, and to Jeremy she carried the warmth with her, like a campfire dying out on a cold night in the mountains.

Her socks still hung over a branch by the pond. Jeremy saw them there, forsaken, and knew he should run before she returned, before she came back and saw him staring at her with red in his face. He couldn't.

Reemerging from the trees, she pulled the socks off the branch and looked across the hair pond at Jeremy. He felt sure she stared into his eyes. Her eyes, for all that they were the full length of the pond away, looked as deep and rich as brown as the pond itself, and her smile was for him. Heart pounding, he looked outward from her eyes, from her inviting mouth, and saw the a face he couldn't recognize away from the rows of books and the chalkboards. Then she had turned and was gone.

A cloud covered the face of the sun, and Jeremy felt cold. Reeling in his fishing line, he walked along the trickled creek back to the lane, and walked slowly along the lane back home. Halfway along, beneath the tired, leaning trees and surrounded by open, green fields, with white clouds looming, he stopped and stared back at where he had left the lane. He stood there for some time.